[novakwok]

[Yes, your company name is really confusing]

LOL, we're not a company, we are just a small team of three individuals(Nova Kwok,Benny Think and Tuki Deng).

[convert images to WebP]

May I ask your use case on this? (As we've recently launched a product called WebP Cloud might fit this need. (And we're actively seeking seed users.))

WebP Cloud documentation here: https://docs.webp.se/webp-cloud/

[tmikaeld]

Alright, they way it was mentioned in the article made it sound like a business, sorry about that.

Your service looks great, but we long since concluded that using an API for image conversion would be many times more expensive than using our own setup. And we also have mixed in fetches from external sources, storage in S3, Cloudflare workers and generative AI mixed in the bag - no single service supports all that yet (hint).

[adventured]

> they way it was mentioned in the article made it sound like a business, sorry about that

It is a business. They're selling a service. I don't know why they're protesting at the notion of being a company, they're de facto a business (selling service behind a brand, which they're openly promoting to sell more services).

[novakwok]

Hmmm, maybe calling this a start-up/business might be more appropriate?

(WebP Cloud Services starts by providing a free service of Gravatar/GitHub Avatar reverse proxy with WebP optimization at first, and now it's our first attempt to make a paid services of private proxy as more of our users want this to be a more generally available service.

(And we are currently not a company indeed) ´･ᴗ･`

No intentional protesting at the notion of being a company, just unsure if "company," "business," and "startup" have the same meaning in certain contexts.

[pbiggar]

If you're planning to build a business together, forming the company ASAP is a good plan. Recently talked to some founders who split up before they incorporated, and it was a mess.

[novakwok]

[If you're planning to build a business together, forming the company ASAP is a good plan.]

Do you have any advice in this regard? We do have a preliminary plan to register a European company in Estonia (through e-Estonia) after achieving good revenue to continue our operations.

[pbiggar]

You absolutely must do this BEFORE any sort of revenue. It should be the first thing you do.

You need a company to own things, such as the IP (code, trademarks, website, customer lists), as well as being the thing to which revenue is paid. You'll also find you can't do most things without it (such as get a credit card, office lease, cloud discounts, etc).

Most importantly, suppose you have a cofounder break up when you have just started getting "good revenue" but haven't yet got a company. Who's is that revenue? Who owns the code you wrote? A complete mess.

I don't know anything about e-Estonia, but if they allow you to sign up today, no reason not to do that. In the US (or abroad if you want a US company), Stripe Atlas is a good option. That might work for you too.

[rat9988]

The moment you started providing a paid service you became a business. The legal status, as in company, independant, or whatever, depends on your local laws.

[dsign]

Ha! Another one :-) !

We created a company that does something similar[^1]. The tech was great and the company is profitable, but the market is really, really tough, with incumbents (read: existent CDNs) playing all sort of "standard business practices"[^2] to keep customers in their more expensive business. And yes, in this line of business you really want the cheapest hardware.

[^1]: Support for transcoding images to WebP, AVIF, JpegXL, and selecting on the flight the best format for serving individual images in a website. Company (ShimmerCat AB, a Swedish registered company) is currently for sale; contact the CEO if you want a bargain[^3], last time I heard ask price was X0 000 USD, with X less than 9. I'm not part of the company in any capacity any longer.

[^2]: Read: standard dirty tricks to suppress the competition.

[^3]: Who is the CEO is public in the Swedish registry of companies.