An Argentinian in Stuttgart: Founding a Startup in Germany

still you have to know enough german or have a german friend who can help you.

in my case we are bootstraped and the cost of a Steuerberater (tax advisor) is kind of high so we are delaying it as much as possible. Still I will need one next month :)

I would actually recommend seeing a Steuerberater before you form your company or register anything anywhere. There's a lot of money you can save on that front.

is not actually a legal form. It only means that you are a single entrepreneur/founder.

> Gewerbeschein

is not required in all cases, especially not for IT people. The final decision is with the tax administration. Your tax accountant can help you there. The general consensus is that if you can avoid it and be a regular freelancer, do so. In pretty much any case you need it if you form a UG or GmbH.

Bookkeeping regulations depend partially on how much income you have. If you have less than 17 500 Euros income a year you can actually be VAT exempt which removes the need for a Umsatzsteuervoranmeldung, but on the other end of the spectrum, you can have the full bookkeeping requirement similar the one that a GmbH has for a GbR if the GbR earns too much.

Right, but a Gewerbeschein helps if you have any other income that's not from freelancing. For example Google AdSense or Amazon Affiliate links etc.

Limited Liability is what you're aiming at.

That is correct, but in most cases highly overrated for people just starting out, especially in IT. An IT-Betriebshaftpflicht (insurance) could be considered though, depending on the type of work you do.

Are you something like a freelancer/coder? Nobody gives a shit about your type of business. The task is to get the job done.

Do you have a B2C business? Customers absolutely don't care.

Do you have a B2B business selling a product or a service? Well, then it might make a difference, but not to every client.

People in Germany are waaaay to self-conscious about the type of company (Rechtsform). It is understandable somehow. I went to a couple seminars (Existenzgründungsseminare) and 2 out of 4 presentations were by lawyers about picking the Rechtsform. Who gives a shit? The attendees didn't earn a single Euro yet and still, they were discussing the Rechtsform as it was the most important thing on earth.

I would say for IT: Either go Freiberuflich, or GmbH. Freiberuflich has the benefit of easier book keeping, lower tax (no Gewerbersteuer), and the drawback of liability and that you must not sell things (e.g. computers, or of the shelf software), but only own code or design. GmbH has the drawback that you need to do real book keeping, and likely need a Steuerberater.

The GbR is the default to avoid. One can do it as single founder, as long as there is no risk. But once you have more founders go for a different form.

edit: this is why it is typically un-German to boost, and more typically German to complain -- they are just pointing out what to fix!

what I mean with the second sentence is that if you want to keep getting good results you have to have a critical view of the things you can improve and try to improve them.

Getting good results in one area shouldn't be an excuse to justify not being good in others.

I hope the interview doesn't sound like I'm only complaining about Germany, it's more in the hope that it improves so more companies can be created and maybe the example is followed by other european countries.

The last time I'd looked up Stuttgart's hackerspaces on hackerspaces.org, the pages looked dead.

look at the latest trend of startups that have hardware as part of their product and the internet of things movement, that will require different skills and there's a lot of that in stuttgart :)