Starting a business

The order most people do this in is backwards, and the expensive mistakes all come from the same two steps.

The order that actually works

Sell something first. Register second. The instinct is the reverse — incorporate, build a brand, get a website, then look for customers — and it is the most common way to spend a year and ten thousand dollars learning something a fortnight of conversations would have told you.

You can invoice as a sole proprietor in most of Canada immediately, or in some provinces simply trade under your own legal name with no registration at all. That is enough to find out whether anyone will pay. Incorporate when there is something worth protecting or a tax reason to.

The two expensive mistakes

Building before selling. A product nobody has agreed to buy is a hypothesis with a bill attached. Three signed intentions beat any amount of market research.

Incorporating too early. A corporation brings annual filings, a separate tax return, accounting fees and a minute book somebody has to maintain. Those are worth paying for a real business. They are pure drag on an experiment.

What genuinely has to happen early

Separate the money. A dedicated bank account from day one, even as a sole proprietor, is the single cheapest decision here — it makes the first tax season an afternoon instead of a fortnight.

And register for GST/HST when you must. The small-supplier threshold in Canada is $30,000 in revenue over four consecutive calendar quarters; cross it and registration stops being optional. Crossing it without noticing means owing tax you never collected.

Creating a company from scratch, honestly

The first version should be embarrassing and cheap. Not because scrappiness is a virtue, but because everything you believe about the business on day one is a guess, and the guesses are wrong in ways only a paying customer will tell you. Build the thing that lets you find out fastest.