@lorak Simplicity is so important when you are solofounding. Keep everything as simple as possible for as long as possible.
In my city/town/village/region/state (keeping things vague here), there are no taxes on the revenue, only on profit. The platforms that I use automatically remit sales tax directly to the tax authorities, so I don’t even need to worry about that.
I try to keep my tax situation as simple as possible. Infact, my entire tax bill last year including this business and my personal taxes (including my significant other) was less than $700 - and the firm I use is very, very good.
The beauty of solofounding a company is that so many of the distractions that are embedded in traditional co-founder startups (legal formations, partnership agreements, complicated ownership and tax situations) are unnecessary and can be completely avoided. I get to spend 100% of my time solving the next business problem, not the next business structure problem, or worse, business structure vendor management.
“Keeping the books” is also incredibly easy as I’ve built it directly into my product. I’ve made it very simple to pull data needed to pull together my yearly taxes. Essentially any manual task that I come across managing this business (like keeping the books), I eventually write up a task to automate it and it eventually gets done and we move on to the next item.
When you aren’t a solo funded and solo founded company, you’d typically just hire that out. But it’s quite advantageous to automate solutions to your problems rather than fixing them with human capital. It allows you to stay lean. I’ve followed this strategy for the entire 4 years.
There is no issue with paying my non-US and outside-of-the-us (important distinction that he is both) freelancer. My bank takes care of the currency conversion and I pay in his preferred currency via wire each month after he issues me an invoice. Unlike most corporate payers who may take 30-90 days to pay an invoice, I usually pay him within 8 hours of receiving an invoice and I am sure he appreciates that. I’ve got no institutional investor telling me we must hold the cash as long as possible to earn as much interest as possible.
The hardest part will be finding a freelancer who cares about your project, who is responsible and friendly, who has expert level technical expertise in the full stack, and who is genuinely a good human being. I got incredibly luckily in this aspect. I do not even know his age, but I suspect he is an older guy, possibly 10-20 years older than me.