On the surface, my immediate thought is that nobody in the situation you describe your boss as being in needs to offer 40% startup equity to a 20 year-old unless he’s planning to exploit that to some extent. As others have mentioned, it’s highly probable that he’s going to expect you to do 100% of the work for 40% share, and/or shelter this new entity from his bankruptcy situation by having it be a partnership.

A savvy lawyer could put something in the operating agreement to protect you well or even benefit from your boss’s shares being seized in bankruptcy, but it’s a risky thing either way.

Brothel/opium den. Easy.

I’ve seen a billboard for a lawfirm where one of the names is “Trollop.”

So what, you’d rather save the $2 and use some free subdomain somewhere?

Yourdomain.biz is a lot better than yourdomain.hostingservice.com.

Stop it right there and forget about this. 12x is asinine for a business like you have been describing.

My dude, a domain can be purchased for as low as like $2 per year if you don’t care about the extension.

Most places where you buy the domain also will sell hosting for like $5/mo. And most of these come with free website builders. I think Google even has a service for this now.

If this is all too confusing, post it on fiver and some student can do this for you very cheap.

If you get a loan and default on it, yes, you would expose your life savings to being taken for repayment.

This is fairly typical in small business when it comes to debt and a lot of people get ruined financially as a result.

First, find an industrial designer on upwork or something. Describe the product for them and they will draw up some sketches of what the finished product will look like.

Then, find a mechanical engineer or product design engineer who can turn those sketches into a manufacturable product. Ask them to build a prototype. Realize that prototypes either look like the final product or work like the final product but, unless you want to spend a lot of money, not both.

Once you have your CAD model and prints, you can find a manufacturer. Look for a contract manufacturer or put the whole thing up for quote on Alibaba.

This is all assuming that this is a mechanical product without electronics.

The cost of all this will vary a lot depending on the manufacturing methods you need to use to build the thing, how complex it is, and all that. $10k-$100k I would guess.

I sold on Amazon for about 10 years before quitting when Covid hit. Through that time I also sold on my own website.

If you’re trying to build a brand long term, stay away from Amazon. Yes you will get sales but your brand will get diluted and eventually usurped by Amazon if you are successful.

Riding the Amazon wave and quitting when I did was one of the best moves of my life. Was selling roughly $500k (total) per year when I started. $9M when I quit. $30M now.

Happy to provide what other insight I can.

See, the one thing I severely neglected (among other stuff), which is probably the most BASIC and FUNDAMENTAL thing for every business, was sending out promotional emails.

Stopped reading here.

Email campaigns are overrated.

Everyone gets about 5% of their year pay as a bonus.

I also try to do a dinner but that doesn’t always materialize due to logistics.