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Ask HN: I've got my first paying customer. Now what?

9 points by dsgrillo ↗ HN
In 2019 I've started developing a project for my wife after consistently hearing her complain about the current software they had.

It's nothing fancy, but it was made specifically to solve the main pain points she had.

Fast forward, she convinced herself that the product is way too good and we should try selling it to other business. So, she made a couple of videos demoing it and spent 20$ on ads in Instagram. We got a couple of interested people, but no one actually asked for using it.

Last week we got an email from a company that was interested in trying in. Then we created an account for them and shortly explained how to use it. They've got really impressed by and now want to use it.

For now, I've said that they can have a free trial for a month. But they already signaled that they're interested in paying the price I've proposed.

So, what's next? Should I go after bootstraping a company? What about taxes? GDPR? SLA? Should I go after a lawyer and accountant? My current recurring cost for maintaining the system is ~10$ and I'm expecting to start receiving ~$200 per customer.

This should be just a side gig, but I think it might actually grow.

In addition, I'm currently living in Italy, but this client (and probably others comming) lives in Brazil.

7 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 29.8 ms ] thread
lxg14
try by outlining a proper contract with them, get some legal input and ask a lawyer to look it over. if the lawyer is worth their salt, they should be able to give better advice than I can.
dsgrillo
Hey, thanks for your suggestion!

Although it got me thinking, what's the worst thing that can happen if I have no contract at all?

lxg14
they can get you into a legal battle of loopholes if they want to be assholes. hopefully they won't, but hey, its 2021.
muzani
I used to freelance without a contract. Bad stuff generally happens, much of it being miscommunication. And when the bad stuff happens, it's usually your fault for not writing a contract.

You don't need a huge contract in legalese. Just 2 sentences will do. Something dumb like "I will give you this, and in return you will give me $300. Once you stop giving me $300, I will stop giving you this."

But yeah, lawyers give better advice and lawyers are often cheaper than programmers.

toast0
If you're in Italy and your client is in Brazil, and this is a $200/month service, neither you nor they are going to pursue international litigation on a contract dispute. It's too expensive and unpredictable.

To some degree, that means your contract doesn't matter, and if it doesn't matter, you don't really need it. But --- a contract sets expectations, and generally, reasonable people will follow reasonable contract provisions when they're written down.

Your lawyer and theirs will have a lot of stuff that's important to say in a contract for legal reasons, but you also want to define the scope, define the service level, define payment terms and cancelation terms. Even if you and they know that nobody will be held to the terms, you can feel OK about turning off their service (which may include deleting their data) if they don't pay after N days, if you said that would happen in the contract, and there's no extenuating circumstance.

siquick
Don't overthink it. Don't setup a company right now, you're not one - yet. If you want to setup an entity quickly with minimum effort then a sole trader would probably be the quickest way to make things 'legitimate'.

Yes make a contract, but there are dozens of sites to get a lawyer-generated contract from. Here's an example for my country: https://lawpath.com.au/

When I got my first few customers my "order form" was just a survey form (I think it was Typeform) to get the companies details, with a Stripe payment embed in it.

There's a lot of good info on here:

https://www.indiehackers.com/start

dsgrillo
Thanks for your advice and for the links!

What would be the advantage of setting up something (either a company or a sole trader)?

I wanna have the least amount of work in those "administration tasks", but I'm also afraid that it can bite me in a future. Do you have an idea of when is the proper time for caring in those tasks? After 1 customer? 10? Or maybe is related to the MRR?

Right now, the system should be stable (with tested backups) and the only bad thing that comes to my mind is not being paid. I'm totally fine if it happens and will worry about only if/when happens.

Am I being naive?