How to validate mvp if you can't accept money unless incorporated?
In some countries (Italy for sure) you can't sell online, can't join affiliate programs, or do anything business-related because you can't legally accept money unless you are already a company.
But as you may object, why start a company if you don't know yet if the idea will work? Well in some country you have this kind of chicken and egg problem, requiring you to risk a lot of money and time in the bureaucracy of company creation if you want a shot - any shot - at testing your idea.
What would you do?
p.s. I believe that market validation that goes just as far as accepting mail subscribers is a little farfetched in some markets...you have to test on real purchases.
Hi, i'm from italy too: i had the same problem you have and decided to not care and start accepting payment via stripe for a side project without emitting invoices. I know it's an uncomfortable situation but until you are only validating your idea, italian fisco (like irs for usa) won't bother messing with you and until your side income is of a few thousands euro,even in case you get fines those will be small and acceptable. My advice is to not stop your project for burocratic reasons.
I guess I'll try this way. (grazie)
well if you want to have a talk with another italian drop me a line at XXXXX.andretti1977 AT gmail.com where XXXXX must be replaced with "giorgio" (will it be sufficient to avoid automatic spam!?)
Put a buy now button, run some traffic to the page, measure conversions. When they click buy now, just say it's sold out or backordered, limited beta, whatever, then ask for an email address. That conversion rate will be much closer to a live site and you don't have to take any money for a product that isn't ready yet.
Can you just set up a personal PayPal account in your country and just accept PayPal and leave the funds there / use it to pay for your hosting / give to charity or something?
In a lot of countries, that's illegal.
Would you be willing to allow an existing company to keep all the revenue if they agree to validate your idea for you until such point where you think you should start a business yourself?
Are you registering the company? It is expensive? You can take the risk. Maybe you can talk to a banker (someone close to you) to justify the transactions. If someone close to you has a registered company, maybe you can receive the transaction through them (giving them a%), why not? Or simply not putting the web to work full time, creating a 2-week statistic, activating the web at intervals can be.
In my good judgment, I do not know if you will make multi-million dollar transactions that alert the State.
Friend are just ideas, ideas with fire included. It involves the money directly.
I just started to blow my imagination xD
All you need to do is just report your income to pay your taxes. Usually, until some level of income nobody cares if you are incorporated or not.
A lot of countries allow you to invoice and collect money until some threshold. Not many people are aware of this, but the law, mainly created to support farmers and small traders allows you to not incorporate until you reach $X,XXX in revenue annually. You will still need to pay the tax, but the way to handle that differs from country to country.
"A lot of countries allow you to invoice and collect money until some threshold"
you can accept money and wait to declare it to government yes, but you can't legally make invoices unfortunately.
Making invoices seems like an odd thing to have as an early priority.
How about buy buttons on your site or publishing something and putting it on Amazon or the App Store or the Play Store? At least according to mobile app store tracking sites, there are hundreds of thousands of Italians doing that on a small scale who couldn't possibly all be incorporated.
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Yes and no...being a sole trader is a bit easier on the bureaucracy but you are a de facto business entity, which means that you are bound to have a CPA and pay taxes (even with zero revenue)...in other words you can't just "try it out" without any form of legal commitment.
Anyway thanks I'll look further into it.