

Ask HN: How do I make money from a startup? - mbet10

Am I allowed to just start accepting money from people through paypal for services my website offers?<p>What legal concerns should I consider before accepting money from users?
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andrewljohnson
You just have to pay your taxes, and you are all good. You can set up an LLC
to funnel all your payments through, but you can also just pump them into your
checking account and give Uncle Sam his due.

Make sure you write off any business expenses - whatever space you use to
work, hosting bills, etc. TurboTax will help you make all the right deductions
no problem.

If you don't live in the US, I don't know :)

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kls
I would say yes you can do this, but as soon as you make a little bit of money
you should really consider filing for a S-Corp not an LLC. Realistically, if
you are doing so little business that you can't afford to set it up right, you
are not going to make a blip on the govs radar, but don't take that as legal
advise.

Also make sure that you register a DBA for you website name, as you can get in
trouble for doing business in any other name that your name if you don't have
a DBA.

For example if you have XYZ.com and you saying on your web site "we at XYZ
pride ourselves on customer service" There is no XYZ entity and it is
considered deceptive to operate as XYZ when legally it does not exist. Fraud
happens this way, so a DBA tells the gov that, hey it's legit, I john doe am
XYZ. Now when you register a corp then that becomes the legal XYZ entity.

