Sounds like you are on the right track and you already have some very bankable skills to be able to go off on an entrepreneurial track. I know that developing your IT skills there are many freelancing jobs available that you can capitalize on.

If you and your friend are to start a company and take crypto as payment I would suggest maybe taking a whole basket of crypto currencies. Dash, Monero, Litecoin, Z-Cash and some others have all proven themselves to be popular and sound technologies with strong track records. I think as far as small transactions go I would MUCH rather use Litecoin than Bitcoin at this point because it is faster and much cheaper.