When to get serious about legal stuff?
At what point do we need to get our ducks in a row w.r.t. legal documents, advisors, etc.? I'm talking about Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, End User License Agreement, Sales Agreement, maybe even Patents.
I know I need all of that and more at SOME point, but I don't want to waste too much money and time on an unproven startup.
Does any of it HAVE to be done before paying customer #1 shows up?
How much can I put off until after there is significant revenue?
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You can use standard boilerplates to start with.
Once you reach a few paying customers - no one really put a number here (for ballpark let's say once you reach $100k in revenue or run rate, you may want to get your get everything cleaned up.
Assuming you have GDPR & CCPA stuff sorted in your product from day # 1
I used to think this stuff was needed at first. Then I did 3 companies, sold 1. Now my opinion has changed.
Paying customers is the only thing you care about. That's mission 1.
Every agreement you do, will be different, for the first 100 customers. Maybe longer.
My Agency, this was true 10 years in.
Unless you have a mature SaaS business (1000's or 10ks) of customers, you will want to be super flexible acquiring customers. This is a huge asset, as you can learn what they want, what works for them, etc.
Taking a stab at this stuff before you've sold anything does more harm than good. It will create a mental block, and force you to be unflexible. At the start, and for a long time, your startup should be very very very flexible.
Sooner the better. In my first company, I hired lawyers to write them. I don't think that's really necessary though. There are many services that can do this and you can verify them with lawyers.