i started taking freelance devops work. stacklance started as a name. then it became stacklance infotech llp, llpin acz-9112.
six years between the first client and the certificate of incorporation. i want to write down what actually changed, because from the outside it looks like a milestone and from the inside it was mostly admin.
what did not change
the clients. the work. the invoices. the hours.
nobody woke up on july 10 and treated me differently because of a filing. the projects that were live stayed live. the same people emailed about the same things.
if you are waiting to incorporate before you feel like a real business, that is the wrong order. the business is real when someone pays you. the paperwork is a wrapper you put around a thing that already exists.
what did change
three things, and only three.
the first is trust at the top of the funnel. us and uk clients above a certain size have procurement, and procurement has a form. a registered entity with an llpin, a pan and a tan clears that form. an individual freelancer sometimes does not. this is not about capability. it is about whose name goes on their vendor list.
the second is the split. the moment there are two partners and a legal entity, capital contribution and profit sharing stop being an understanding and start being a number in a document. that conversation is not fun and it is much worse to have it after money is sitting in an account.
the third is that i now have deadlines that have nothing to do with any client. there is filing to keep on top of, and it does not care what is shipping that week. that is the part nobody mentions when they congratulate you on registering.
none of that ships anything. all of it has a date.
the part i underestimated
how much of incorporation is other people’s timelines.
the ca has your documents. the bank has the ca’s documents. the address on one partner’s form does not match the address on their aadhaar, so everything stops until that is resolved. these are not hard problems and you cannot brute force any of them with more hours.
i am used to being the bottleneck. it is a strange adjustment to be the person waiting.
would i do it earlier
yes, but not much earlier.
the honest test is not revenue. it is whether you have lost a deal because of who you were on paper, or whether you are about to split money with someone on a handshake. either one, incorporate. neither one, keep shipping and revisit in six months.
what i would not do is what i almost did, which is treat the registration as an achievement to announce. it is a form. the achievement was the six years of work that made the form worth filing.