Starting up: Incorporating options, and the Clerky Lifetime Package

My friend and I decided to start a company. Here, and in future posts, I’ll be writing a little about our experience in exploring the SaaS ecosystem around starting a company: various tools and services that we’ve found useful.

One of the first things we wanted was to set up a company entity and to get a bank account. Because we were doing e-commerce, we wanted to keep accounting for the company in one place, so that bookkeeping would be easier. Our main priorities here were speed, price, and certainty.

Looking around online, there were four main ways of setting up:

1. Get a lawyer. This is probably the most common fallback, and probably how a lot of companies get started themselves. In reading advice, it seems having a lawyer can accommodate a good range of corporate structures. But, being outsiders, I think we had very little idea of what to expect in terms of time, money, and quality. In that regard, it feels a lot like finding a doctor, or hiring a contractor. We just didn’t want to deal with this.
2. Clerky. As far as I can tell, this is what a lot of people have been using. People seem to be pretty happy with them, and I found their cofounder popping up on social media, claiming that people who used Clerky to incorporate ran into fewer problems down the road. I don’t really know what those problems would be, but what was a nice signal was that plenty of people seemed to use it and nobody hated it.
3. Stripe Atlas. Stripe came out with this in 2016, and it’s their packaged way of bundling incorporation, banking, and a Stripe account all at once. It seems really good, if you can go through it. I had tried to use it once on a previous project, and found the round-trip-communication to be long. After submitting my application, Stripe asked me questions, which I answered, and didn’t get subsequent details/questions until almost three weeks later. I heard that they were going through a lot of volume at that time, and maybe the business flow I wanted to pursue was risky. But it would’ve been great to get more details, sooner — we didn’t want to wait weeks for an EIN.
4. Gust Launch. I’ve seen a lot of press from Gust (their CEO shows up on social media touting it a lot), but I just haven’t seen much in terms of customer reviews. Their bundle seems to give a lot, but their most basic plan comes in at $300/year. That just seems pretty steep, and especially since I still don’t know if a lot of people are happy with their product.

Given all that, we went with Clerky. They had a “lifetime package” that wasn’t too expensive (800) and seemed to cover a lot of basic things for the first few years of our company.

Pros:

• We were in fact, able to incorporate. Turnaround was pretty fast (signup->finalization took 5 days total), and the package did everything.
• It had an integration with startup banks, which made it a little easier to apply for a bank account (some documents were already uploaded)

Cons:

• Their UI is still confusing. It’s not always clear what elements are clickable.
• Instead of sending emails out immediately, they queue it up. So if you’re new to it (like me), you might spend a while waiting for emails that aren’t supposed to show up yet.

There were also some hiccups in the process of actually signing up. We found the pricing for the lifetime package like so:

Clicking through to “Get Started”, I would have expected to go into something that launches the “Package” option. Instead, clicking and then signing in (I already had a Clerky account) gets you to your main documents page, which looks like this:

No sign of how to really trigger the package. If you try to click “new”, you get to a page like

and if you click “Incorporation”, you get to

And if you click one more, you get a screen like:

So far, this is kind of scary, because I clicked through a couple of different screens without any acknowledgement of the startup package, and now it looks like I’ll have to pay $407 for a thing that’s not what we even wanted. I wasn’t sure if existing accounts failed to trigger something in their app, so I ended up just creating a second Clerky account with the email we wanted with the business. If I recall correctly, it still sent me to something like the standard incorporation set like above. But this time we were a little braver about clicking through, and eventually it told us we were in the package.

Hope that helps!

(As a little plug): I wrote a little tool to remind you to keep in touch with your friends here. Give it a whirl!