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Ask HN: Opening a company

4 points by jgalvez ↗ HN
So I've got a ridiculously simple idea which I think is pretty good. That is, it is something I'd pay to use and people I've asked would pay to use too. It's a subscription-based service where I will be able to charge $10 to $25 monthly per user.

I have taken the time to write the code for it and it seems to work very nicely. I could only work on it on weekends since I have a day job which I like very much. But quite surprisingly, despite having worked on it for only 10 hours so far, I think it's already good enough to try it with a group of friends.

Also, despite having what I think is a strong business model, I'm not willing to take any investment money whatsover, so if I do manage to launch it, I'll pay for hosting and everything myself. Now the question: I'm a Brazilian citizen living in Brazil, and one of the things I think I'll need is to actually be able to found a company in the US or UK, so I can have a business bank account there, so I can have the website take international credit cards via Authorize.net or something.

Does anyone have experience with that? Requirements? Fees? How hard could that be? My guess is that I'll need to hire some professional assistance, I just have no idea where to look.

3 comments

[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 11.9 ms ] thread
swombat
Surely you can take international credit cards with a Brazilian merchant account? If authorize.net don't allow that, there are many other similar providers which can help.

Setting up a merchant account is a major pain in the ass (and slow) even if you are based in the UK... I imagine it'd be even harder if you're not, and really, it's not worth the hassle unless there's really no other way to take CC payments.

RiderOfGiraffes
The answer is probably yes, and you give no clues as to what you're doing (understandably) but do you need CCs? Might it not be possible just to use PayPal? Since you hold the service, if someone doesn't pay you can email a reminder, give them 2 weeks' grace, then simply pull their plug.

Credit card payments can be a complete pain. In the UK it's very common to set up Direct Debits, which have all sorts of guarantees to make them attractive.

epoweripi
Have you tried a local payment gateways that accept international Credit cards?

That might be easier. From my experience in India - most payment gateways suck real bad and at some point you will need to contact them for support.

It surely makes it easier to get support locally than overseas esp. with all the timezn diffs.