I will ignore all the later stages of a company and only focus on the first few things you need to have in place.

India has a lot of opaque paperwork and depending on which legal advisor/CA you go to, you get a different reply for the same question.

There is so much information to go through and so many edge cases that while starting a company, you just can't jump into it with all your enthu and let things set their course.

If you want to go all legit and clean, you will have to really understand the paperwork more than your market share.

You can't just go to one place, ask to be registered as a company and get all relevant information in one go. You have to hop from department to department, office to office for this. All of this is precious time you're not spending on your product.

On top of this, India suffers from the problem of solving issues at the wrong end. A lot of the regulatory decisions they take, stand in the way of a startup trying to gain ground by making people's lives simpler.

[ Example ] We want to charge a user's credit card automatically when they consent in some form.

The problem Businesses charge users without consent in some cases.

Ideal solution Make credit card companies accept and process proper charge backs like they do everywhere else in the world.

Indian solution add a whole new redirect and pin entering which can't happen without being online.

Result can't do that, go for a wallet service.

[ / Example]

We are already some good experience points from a customers POV if they have to put money with us for the ease of auto-charges.

In some cases there are no workarounds, in others, there is never ending sea of paperwork to go through. More licenses and more offices to visit.

I'll just ignore the amount of bribe you'd need to pay in each of these places to get your work done. That's a whole another can of worms.

And even after the truck loads of documents to go through, there are a lot of cases, where there is no provision for your kind of business at all, and that is scarier because one fine day, they can make a regulation without providing any alternate channel and completely disrupt your model. The alternative will come after 2 years when you've either already changed your business model or have given up.

Eg: concierge services on alcohol delivery. We can't sell it, but can we do deliveries? Regulations are silent. So, basically if you can dare to get into legal trouble later on, go ahead swing it. Otherwise don't touch it at all.

Now someone or the other is going to swing it for sure..

When most of your day is getting spent talking to legal advisors, CAs and the like, how are you going to focus on your product?

The way everyone that grows past nascent stage inevitably picks is, they stop waiting for these paperworks and swing it. Let the paperwork happen at it's own pace.

"When the day comes, we'll deal with the regulations and consequences"

Sometimes the decisions they hinge their businesses on are not allowed by the regulations and these people get fucked.

i.e. a legit business will fail waiting for paperwork to finish on everything. Clever hacks work, but only to a certain extent.

And that is a very wrong mindset to practically force a business into.

Literally every investor, friend suggests you to incorporate outside the country. That in itself speaks volumes about our friendliness.

There's more, way more and I'll discover them in intricate detail as I walk through this mine field.