
Ask HN: Good incorporation service for startups that is not Stripe Atlas? - xrd
Looking for a startup (friendly|optimized) site&#x2F;service to incorporate.<p>Interested in the best combination of these options:<p>- Delaware incorporation<p>- Integration with a payment solution (?)<p>- Bank account setup&#x2F;integration. (?)<p>- Good customer service, small enough to care about me as a customer (at least during the registration process).<p>My customers will primarily be enterprise customers, typically paying &gt;$10k per invoice.<p>(Why not Stripe Atlas? I recently tried to incorporate with them using Atlas, and had an extremely frustrating experience with their customer service. I believe their site pulled in an old company name from a previously abandoned registration (or perhaps it was an auto-complete problem on my side). Either way, the company name was wrong in the application. I did the DocuSign paperwork from my phone and didn&#x27;t notice the erroneous name until a day later, and immediately contacted customer support in three different ways. The company had not yet been formed with the state of Delaware so I was optimistic the process could be halted. I had multiple people from Stripe Atlas support (via email and chat) indicate they would be in contact regarding the issue. Nothing happened and then a few days later I got the succession of emails indicating &quot;Congratulations, your (erroneously named) company has been formed!&quot; &quot;Congratulations, another impossible to revert registration has happened!&quot; &quot;Congratulations, we billed you $500 to setup the wrong company!&quot; I made a mistake in signing the DocuSign with the wrong name, but it seemed like their service is optimized for moving things through as quickly as possible (which is what I&#x27;m sure 99% of the people want) and has no tolerance for making corrections. All that is understandable, but the disconnect between their customer service who indicated they would do something, and then completely dropping out of the conversation really left me feeling frustrated.)
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bearton
Have you tried Clerky?

As some practical unsolicited advice, most prominent law firms in the bay area
charge $2500k - $5k for full incorporation service and you can negotiate to
defer typically $10k - $25k in fees until you do a first fundraise or have
enough cash flow to start paying your bills. These firms are expensive, but
paying a few thousand to make sure things are done right will go a long away
as the cost of fixing this stuff later can exceed $10k. If you have a simple
or low touch business, then maybe some of these automated services will work
well for you. Otherwise, if you are considering raising venture money at some
point, I'd suggest going with a traditional law firm or use these services as
a starting point and have a lawyer give everything they are doing a quick scan
to make sure they are doing things right.

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bearton
Full disclaimer: I am a startup lawyer myself so there is some bias. I don’t
have experience with stripe atlas or clerky, so I would be curious to hear how
your experience with stripe atlas turns out

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xrd
An update: Edwin from Stripe reached out to me and I'm much happier with the
resolution he proposed. He also indicated this was an anomaly and unusual and
explained why, and that they are putting things in place to prevent my
situation from occurring again. I'm feeling much happier about using Stripe
Atlas at this point. He did not ask me to write this but I felt it was
important to note that Stripe as an organization worked hard to make this
right with me.

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edwinwee
I'm really sorry about this trouble. I'd like to dig into this mix-up and get
it corrected. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com?

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xrd
Sure, I'll email you.

