[anigbrowl]

Technically you're self-employed, just not profitable. You should pay yourself a salary or else you're basically asking the government to subsidize your startup for free. As a pragmatic matter you could just lie about looking for paid employment and you'll probably get away with it, but if you do get caught then they'd throw the book at you.

A start-up is not different from hanging out your shingle in any other self-employment capacity, except insofar as you have the potential to make much more money in a relatively short space of time if you get lucky. It doesn't exempt you from your legal obligations. Indeed now that I think about it another reason you should be paying yourself a salary is that otherwise it's going to be hard to disentangle your personal expenses from those of the business for tax purposes later on, and you might wind up paying more in legal/accounting fees than you think you are saving.