This was the pre-Gerstner era of the “Baby Blues”: Lexmark, AdStar, Pennant, Eduquest, Advantis/ISSC, and some others I’ve forgotten. In the end IBM spun off Lexmark, Federal Systems (to Loral), AdStar never spun out but was the division sold to Hitachi. Lexmark was “small” printers and keyboards, Pennant was the room sized beasts. Advantis became IBM Global Network, sold to AT&T in 2000.
If I were in your spot, today, I would write markdown format documents in a github repo (or comparable service). Focus now on capturing information, you will never find the perfect solution and it sounds like time is not on your side at the moment. It won't be perfect, but you can start capturing information, you get tracking, you get their security model.
No direct experience, but have helped a family member start up a business and invested in a few restaurants.
Figure out how much money you're comfortable losing first. That is, assume it's a complete failure after a year or two, how much of your retirement savings or income are you willing to set on fire?
Use that number to figure out a realistic budget for starting up a retail space.
If you don't want the monthly burn rate of a leased storefront, maybe start with a stall at some shared selling space.
The family member started by building up a reputation for their work out of a shared studio and after many years finally broke out and rented their own space. They were initially swamped by licensing regulations and restrictions placed on the business by the landlord after they'd signed the lease (like, the landlord wanted to restrict the number of people in the space because he'd "heard things" about tattoo parlors). Lesson: get a sense of all of the regulations and laws and jurisdictions that are going to intersect with the business ahead of time. In this case they family member was surprised that the city, county, and state had conflicting regulations that they were expected to abide by.
With the restaurants the two biggest lessons were: everyone always underestimates how much it will cost to build out the space. Everyone. Four restaurants (two still active) and every single one blew out their budgets for the initial renovations, requiring either new capital contributions or debt or both. To a lesser extent my relative encountered the same thing. And it's easy to observe from the side and say "well, duh, that's how all projects are" but if you've never done it there's no reason to doubt the contractor saying it'll take $100k and ninety days to do the work you've laid out.
Second: there's no safety net except what you set aside. Generally true for all businesses but larger businesses can usually get lines of credit or other debt instruments. Covid was a remarkable black swan that the restaurants only survived (in some form) with government intervention. At best each had 30-60 days' cash (one of the first things their banks did was freeze any outstanding debt/financing lines once the impact of Covid started to take shape).
I'm semi-retired and keep toying with an electronics store front ala Heath Kit or Radio Shack classic. Thing is, every time I run the numbers it barely breaks even, and this is in NYC where it's easier in many ways to run highly targeted retail store fronts. And I just can't run the risk of burning a couple of years of retirement funds on a lark that at best breaks even.
The SE was just small enough that I could cart it in the bag that was available to/from my campus office. I recall being fond of the IIcx but couldn’t afford one even once I graduated.
Because some of us do not want to live in a country where your rights disappear the moment you cross a state line depending on your ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, nationality, etc.
From personal experience search engines don’t honor 404 or 410.
I switched much of my personal site to returning 410 over a decade ago and Googlebot still returns on a routine basis re-requesting a document that hasn’t been on the site since 2012.
Out of paranoia I just checked and yeah, GoogleBot actual (and not the dozens of fakes) requested each 410'd URL at least once a month, some URLs get multiple requests per month. All have been marked 410 since 2014 or earlier.
Wasn't a founder at the time so feel free to ignore the rest of this, but…after five soul crushing, burn out generating, years as the main guy in the dot com era I took a ~7 month sabbatical. It was awesome, totally reset and cleared my head, allowed me to mentally review what I’d learned and separate the good lessons from the bad. But I did not structure the down time well and felt that I wasted about a third of the time I was out. The biggest downside was that on returning…people wanted me to just go back to what I was doing and I wasn't interested in that at all.
My advice: figure out where you want to go first, even if only as a hazy general notional direction. Is your goal to return to the organization renewed and ready to keep going on what you're doing? Or to find a different path?
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