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?

What legal concerns should I consider before accepting money from users?

[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 :)

[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.

[mbet10]

Awesome - thanks!