Our ol’ grandpappy had it tough. Back in his day, when he wanted to build a new startup, he’d first spend months coveting the right venture capitalist, undergo hours of interrogations about his planned “agile development methodology” while being assaulted with steaks and strip clubs, diligently select the right lawyers to incorporate the company, and then he’d carefully spend a year or two assembling a crack team of multi-decade tenured employees from Oracle and Deloitte so they’d have just the right chance at cracking the $100k ARR mark by the time Java 1.4 dropped.
You already know the joke I’m going to make here: some teenager’s agent just
ripped out a seven figure banger in the same time it took me to come up with a
funny way to shoehorn Java 1.4 into the opener.
All that to say: things are happening really fuckin’ fast these days, to the point where the incorporation step isn’t an afterthought in the middle of a paragraph; in many cases it’s the real blocker.
Never been faster; not fast enough
About a year ago, back when LLMs would take days to build relatively okay software (ugh, so disgustingly long), I built Calendearing, a very tiny piece of software to fix an annoyance I had with merging all of my dozen-plus calendars into one URL that I could share with my wife. That’s it. I’m pretty sure the build phase took four hours before I got to a point I was happy with.
It was something small, valuable to me, and I figured hey, could be valuable to other people, too, so I slapped a flat yearly price on it and deployed it.
Four hours for the build out, but it took something like a week before I could actually launch it. I had to wait over the weekend for my EIN and legal docs and everything to get set up in order to accept payments, separate the finances for it, and so on. Even a week is practically light years compared to what our ol’ grandpappy had to go through, but when you’re now at the point where you can conceivably build a real business in days or hours… the extra wait time feels artificially annoying. (There’s a lot of great government work happening, too: the IRS has been doing instant EINs for most people for years, and Europe has a ton of exciting stuff happening with EU-INC.)
Something I keep finding myself telling other entrepreneurial people is: get an LLC. Even if you don’t particularly have something in mind to launch right now, it’s worth grabbing one to be able to move quickly in the event that you do. They’re not particularly difficult to get: Stripe Atlas has been building out LLCs alongside C-corps for awhile, and there are also oodles of other LLC creators out there; just ask your agent.
An LLC will help you force a separation of personal and work finances from the start, it’ll help you accept payments or sign up for a bank account, and it’ll give you some legal liability shielding too. (You do pool your liability across ventures, but that’s usually a reasonable tradeoff if they’re all early-stage.) You can also use it for other uses, too, like using it for short-term contracting gigs.
But I just love the idea of having a pre-made company at hand to try a number of weird different directions; some of them might shake out to become real businesses. GitHub, Inc., for example, was not started as GitHub, Inc.: the company started as Logical Awesome, LLC. The goal was to create a suite of companies — a version control system, maybe an issue tracker next, etc. — that would form the basis of the overall revenue stream. GitHub itself just accidentally became huge before other products could be made. Then we went back and later re-incorporated as GitHub, Inc.
Cost-wise it’s maybe $500 a year, all in (unless you have the pleasure of living in California, in which case you have to add their inane $800 on top). But that’s pretty reasonable considering the optionality it gives you to just… build shit these days. Ideas are cheap, and building them has never been cheaper. Be ready the next time when that shower thought hits you.