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johnorourkeon Foggy Periods, just a confused thought dump

My harsh advice, based on real and similar experience, is to get a job. Just to tide you over, to let you get back on your feet. Look for something in construction - maybe with a consulting firm that works with potential clients of your future business. Heck, they might even be interested in marketing the system you've developed. Regardless, what you really want in the future is freedom and stability, and to sacrifice the health and relationships you have now for that goal is a huge price to pay. I did it, I know.

Next, screw marketing - you don't need that right now. Maybe you had bad advice or just made it up, but what you need is sales - very different from marketing. You are the best sales person because you're the one who saw the need and believes in your solution. Forget websites and blogs and social media, that's not right for you - just talk to people and get them talking to people, until you can make contact with and sit down with potential customers. Tell them about the solution, land your first big friendly client and make them happy.

Just my 0.02 based on real life experience :)

johnorourkeon TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats That Prove It

Who needs stats... my teenage kids pretty much ignore 200 satellite channels and instead watch youtube, read forums and IM their friends.

When they were growing up I allowed them to be bombarded with information - TV on, web access, phones from an early age - and they've developed the ability to filter it quite well and just ignore things that don't interest them.

The only down side is:

"awww dad I didn't get anything done today" "why, son?" "some Internet happened"

johnorourkeon Ask HN: Why aren't there HTTP style standards for invoicing things?

ANSWER TO YOUR GENERALISED QUESTION:

cXML http://cxml.org/ , OCI and EDI (mentioned above) are alive and well and commonly used for large corporates to deal with their suppliers without paper.

cXML (or even OCI) for the purchase order stage and EDI for the invoice stage is a typical setup.

ANSWER FOR YOUR SPECIFIC ISSUE:

The reason this doesn't and will never exist is that every business is different - you're essentially dealing with people like Joe Bloggs not standardised processes like HTTP. However, help is at hand:

https://www.receipt-bank.com/ - they take your email and paper invoices in any format, scan them, key in the data and inject it straight into your accounts system (or at least let you grab a spreadsheet).