Boxed Ice, the company behind Server Density, blogs about MongoDB in production, server monitoring, pricing and running a bootstrapped startup.
HN commenters praise the founder's openly shared startup details and cite its MongoDB notes, though one criticizes its downplaying of durability tradeoffs.
With all due respect and without being snarky, your steps are wrong. Try these ones:
1. Register a business (Ltd, LLC, etc)
2. Open a Business Bank Account
3. Implement Paypal to get yourself up and running,
4. Prove that there's a market for your product, people will pay for it, people will continue to pay for it, you don't have lots of chargebacks, you're capable of managing sensible customer relations, and generally are as small a risk as possible for any merchant account. As a bonus, this also validates your business plan before you invest too much time in irrelevant admin.
5. Go and talk to your bank. And every other bank out there. Shop around, shop around, shop around.
(As an aside, read David Mytton's blog: http://blog.boxedice.com/2009/05/20/taking-payments-online-merchant-account-payment-processor-fees/ )
6. Profit!
EDIT: fixed formatting
You have some catching up to do... :)
They are not at all concerned about normal form or joins - it's just not that kind of a database.
Here are some good blog posts that elaborate on the current non-RDBMS fad:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/02/is-the-relational-database-doomed.php
http://www.metabrew.com/article/anti-rdbms-a-list-of-distributed-key-value-stores/
http://randomfoo.net/2009/04/20/some-notes-on-distributed-key-stores
http://bcbio.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/evaluating-key-value-and-document-stores-for-short-read-data/
http://blog.boxedice.com/2009/07/25/choosing-a-non-relational-database-why-we-migrated-from-mysql-to-mongodb/
You just don't know about the other side of the coin -- no durability to start with. You'll be flying fast, until one day you realize your data is corrupted.
Not saying it is bad thing to optimize for speed, it is just a bit dishonest to downplay the negative effects especially after calling a product a DATA-base.
http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/392868405/mongodb-durability-a-tradeoff-to-be-aware-of
http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/02/28/notes-from-a-production-mongodb-deployment/
I've commented on this here: http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/02/28/notes-from-a-production-mongodb-deployment/#comment-818
Essentially this decision was due to the disk space requirements because of the way MongoDB allocates files for each DB.
There are no performance tradeoffs for using lots of collections. See http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Using+a+Large+Number+of+Collections
I applied recently to Server Density (but was rejected). What attracted me was their job description offering "unlimited" vacation. But you actually get a bonus if you take more than 5 weeks. I thought that was a good way to make sure people actually use their vacation time.
http://blog.boxedice.com/2011/08/19/our-holiday-vacation-policy-unlimited-with-bonuses/
ServerDensity is another tool that's good at notifying you if something is amiss on your server: http://www.serverdensity.com/
As a bonus, the creator of ServerDensity has a great blog that shares details of his entrepreneurial bootstrapping endeavor: http://blog.boxedice.com/