Bizzy's Launch List: Start your business or startup in 12 guided steps
Bizzy's Launch List is a guided 12-step platform for people who want to start a business or startup in the United States. It's built around the U.S. Small Business Administration's 10 Steps to Start a Business and pairs each step's work with AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot) used as a co-pilot.
The 12 steps
- Steps 1-3 · Market discovery: Why you're building, who your customers are, what competitors look like.
- Step 4 · Your AI co-pilot: Set up AI tools to draft, check, and speed up every step ahead.
- Steps 5-6 · Strategy: Designing your MVP, bootstrapping cheaply, and choosing a business structure (LLC vs sole prop vs S-Corp). Maps to SBA Step 2: Write your business plan and Step 3: Fund your business.
- Step 7 · Formation: Naming your business, registering it, and getting your EIN. Maps to SBA Step 5 through Step 8.
- Steps 8-10 · Operations & compliance: Websites and work platform, licenses and permits, business banking, and your startup costs. Maps to SBA Step 9 and Step 10.
- Steps 11-12 · Go to market: A final pre-launch review, then launching your business.
Key concepts taught
Business structures. A sole proprietorship is the default: no filing, no fee, but no liability protection. An LLC requires a state filing (typically $50-$500) and keeps personal assets separate from business assets. S-Corp election is a tax election available to LLCs and corporations once net profit clears roughly $60,000 per year. C-Corps are mainly for venture-capital-backed businesses.
EIN. Apply for an Employer Identification Number directly at irs.gov. It's free and takes about 5 minutes. Never pay a third-party service for this.
MVP / lean startup. Before committing to a lease or a loan, build the cheapest possible version of your business that real customers can pay for. Run a farmer's-market pop-up before signing a restaurant lease. Take a few founding clients before incorporating. Pre-sell on Kickstarter before manufacturing inventory. The lean methodology comes from Eric Ries (HBR) and Steve Blank (Stanford GSB).
Human-centered design. Pioneered by IDEO and taught at Stanford's d.school, this approach starts from the person who'd pay you rather than from the product you want to build. Three lenses: desirability (do people want it?), feasibility (can you build it?), viability (can it sustain itself financially?).
Generative AI for founders. Modern AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot) can compress weeks of solo founder work into days: drafting business plans, summarizing competitor reviews, generating temporary brand assets, translating IRS pages into plain English. The caveat: AI models can sound confident while being wrong on specific rules (tax thresholds, state filing fees, license requirements). Always verify against primary sources like sba.gov and irs.gov.
Authoritative sources