Should I Form an LLC or Register a Domain First? | Hacker News Reader

Should I Form an LLC or Register a Domain First?

domainregistry.com

17 pointswalterbell11 comments

It's cute to see commenters answering the question while the article is also doing that work.

Anyway, honest question: who the hell is "domainregistry.com"? They claim they've been "accredited since 1996". I've never, ever heard of them, and I used to work for InterNIC.

Their so-called founder, "Larry Erlich", is not notable either. Neither of these have Wikipedia entries. Does anyone know who they are, or where they came from?

Fwiw: https://icannwiki.org/Larry_Erlich

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/11/business/e-commerce-repor...

The company was sold to a large provider of LLC's a few years ago. The web page gives the impression somewhat that Larry is still involved but he's not. It's PR on behalf of the company that bought them (a large company that primarily registers LLC's).

> Neither of these have Wikipedia entries.

(I have done contracting for them.) This is on purpose not everybody wants to have widespread publicity. And in fact very little is known about the company that acquired them and that also is on purpose. The sale was done quietly and not announced.

> They claim they've been "accredited since 1996".

It doesn't say that at all. It says they were founded in 1996 (true) and '3rd oldest ICANN-accredited registrar still in operation' (most likely true since they were in the initial post testbed approval batch). That said saying 'we founded' is wrong; the company who owns them now didn't start the company the founder did.

buy a domain.

only register i.e form an LTD | LLC when the company can generate predictable revenue for at least 2 months.

nothing is a nightmare - dealing with issues for an LLC that can't pay its own bills and being forced to file forms every year for something that's not making money

I have made that mistake twice before.

now I will only register an LLC if I can make at least $20k/month

> now I will only register an LLC if I can make at least $20k/month

That can be fairly risky depending on the type of business though, because an LLC gives you liability protection. Your strategy is probably fine for a B2C SAAS software business since there isn't much potential for liability there, but it would be really risky for any sort of business that operates in the "physical" world.

yeah -- this is all made on assumption you're running a b2b | b2c saas

you know the ones were a customer pays you less than $1k a year

In places like Germany it's set up so they don't want you to have liability protection, they'd rather you don't do things that create liability. Is it different in America?

It's easy to avoid liability if you're selling a calculator app, but much harder if you're a plumber. Also, lawsuits tend to be more frequent and for higher values in the US than almost anywhere else in the world, so even relatively "safe" businesses are still somewhat risky.

Wikipedia makes it sound like forming a German business is quite expensive and time consuming [0], so I can certainly see why you'd want to avoid incorporating if possible there. But in Canada, it only takes an hour and a few hundred dollars to incorporate (random example [1]), so it's usually worth the effort/cost unless the business is tiny.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GmbH

[1]: https://abregistry.ca/product/alberta-corporation-standard

You can hold it as yourself for as long as you need. No harm to having domains except a few dollars of annual cost.

It’s easy for another person to register it at any time, so grab it first.

The scenario of registering a company only to find that someone else bought the domain and you now need to pay them a chunk of money to get started is not where you want to be.

Apparently cybersquatter bots can monitor brand new company registrations and scalp domain names for resale to the same company.

yep exactly my point. Grab the domain first, and then get the relevant socials 'usernames' (Less relevant these days with people using so many diff socials services).

My usual steps are:

1. Register domain

2. Setup email, including some account for social media

3. Register accounts with main social media services using the social media email address.

Resolve the corporate entity after this first step.

In a parallel universe, legal entity formation uses distributed transactions across multiple digital systems, to eliminate race conditions in identifier assignments.

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