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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

On a contrary note, many more of my circle in the UK are running small businesses than their peers in the US.

N.B. the distinction between startup and small business.

The US is not a very friendly place to run a small agency or an artist's studio - here in the UK it costs a few pounds to register a company (or nothing as a sole trader), and doing accountancy and compliance is WAY easier. It's fairly simple to employ someone in the UK, but it's hard in the US without a league of accountants and lawyers behind you - hence why stuff like Stripe Atlas exists. I wouldn't run a business in the US with revenue below 150k.

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I am so confused by this comment. Accounting software for small businesses is standard. Quick books is so ubiquitous and it's dirt cheap and supposed to be operated by a lay person. There are whole professions here are almost exclusively small businesses. Trucking being a decent call out. I know several moonlighting tech people who spun up single person businesses using a template and carried on that way for years just using very basic accounting software. They do contracts and everything on their own. I have an aunt who has spun up several businesses doing business with the actual federal government and she's never had more than an accountant she has check her receipts for taxes. She has no background in anything and somehow was able to launch these businesses. I have writer friends and artist friends who have LLCs. I've never heard anything like what you're talking about.

I don't know anything about the UK, but it most certainly is not hard to spin up a business in the US.

I agree about QuickBooks being good for small businesses.

Perhaps I've just been so personally burned by how complicated US compliance is from outside (form 5471 and friends being a personal boogeyman of mine) that I've missed that it's quite easy to do business inside the US. I am aware that you have to do stuff like file as a foreign business if you do business between multiple states.

I don't like that you have to pay a private monopoly company (Intuit) to stand a chance of being compliant with your tax obligations over there.

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