Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmngomes | Hacker News Reader

>> "An angel investor would be able to assist you with company registration, however you can also do it yourself through an agency."

Although this is true, I would seriously advise the founder to get his own (trustworthy) lawyer assist him through the process, as with everything related to incorporating the company (ownership and investment structure).

View on HN

More legal advice is always nice but it costs and may not add significant value. Registration tends to be straightforward and necessarily formalizes ownership structure to a significant extent. That said, lawyers may be useful for contracts. If the OP has concerns about registration costs, my advice would be to hold off lawyers at this stage and get a customer first.

Can't get the customers without registering the company (stripe won't let me go live :) )

Did you look into Stripe Atlas? - they do all the work of setting up the company and bank for around $500.

I did look, but it looks like overkill for the initial start (I don't even know will someone buy the product or not).

you have an MVP that sounds like you've actually honored the "M" part (as many fail to). You find it useful already. Do you honestly think you won't be able to get $500 worth of customers? If you really think that, then just stop. It's not worth your time, because $500 worth of customers is nothing. I'm assuming you're charging more than $1.

If you can get more than $500 worth of customers then who cares? All businesses have costs. The question is, can you recoup them?

Yes, you can incorporate yourself online for like $150, and about an hour with google will tell you which form of corporation is the best fit for you. Probably S-Corp I'd bet. C-Corp is probably overkill.

BUT regardless of if you use that Stripe service or not, use their $500 barrier of entry as a guide for if it's worth continuing or not, because obviously it's enough to make you pause.

Is it not viable using a personal Paypal account at this stage?

starting a business with your finances managed by a company that can, and will, close accounts, and freeze funds for no reason at all is crazy. Especially when they frequently do it when someone suddenly starts making decent money, something all new startups hope to do.

paypal is a dangerous idea to build a business on. Use a real bank that is legally forced to act in a responsible manner with regards to your funds.

No one is suggesting that the business should be built on Paypal. We're talking about a phase where the company is trying to land its first 14 customers or so.

I don’t think that’s right. You can have the account in your name AKA sole proprietorship with a dba and then change it to the legal entity later (you may have to migrate to a new account, I can’t recall) but it’s not too hard. Anyway until you have paying customers I’d put off everything else.

Some big firms will do this level of basic legal assistance for small start ups as part of their pro bono program. I believe Bingham McCutchen does, for one, though I don’t know how you apply.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com