In 2023, I incorporated a Delaware LLC while sitting in India.
The entire process took roughly 20 to 25 days.
We were building Techlitic Solutions with partners and needed a proper entity through which we could operate internationally, collect payments, work with customers and build the business seriously.
The incorporation got done.
We put the required business infrastructure around it.
We started operating.
Then we went back to doing what founders are supposed to be doing: getting customers and growing the business.
That company is still running today and has grown into a business doing millions of dollars in revenue.
A couple of years later, we started exploring a very different direction.
We thought:
Why not build more of the business from India?
We were interested in starting with subcontracting opportunities around government projects, understanding the ecosystem, gradually participating in larger projects and, if everything worked, eventually shifting more of our operations to India.
Being Indian, living in India and already running businesses here, I assumed setting up the Indian entity would be the easier part.
It wasn’t.
In fact, my experience trying to establish and operate an LLP in India was significantly more frustrating than creating a US company from thousands of kilometres away.
And that experience changed the way I think about company incorporation.
Why We Needed an Indian Company
The reason wasn’t simply that having another company sounded good.
There was a proper business case.
We were looking at government and institutional opportunities where having an Indian legal entity would eventually become important.
The plan wasn’t to immediately chase giant government contracts.
We wanted to start smaller.
Work on subcontracted projects.
Understand how execution happens.
Develop the required network and capabilities.
Then gradually move towards larger opportunities.
But there was another, much more basic reason for incorporating.
Payments.
This is something people discussing startup incorporation often underestimate.
A registered business isn’t just a certificate sitting somewhere.
For an early-stage company, incorporation unlocks infrastructure.
Bank accounts.
Payment gateways.
Contracts.
Invoices.
Vendor onboarding.
Tax documentation.
Enterprise credibility.
And all of these influence whether somebody is comfortable doing business with you.
Payments Are Part of Go-to-Market
Suppose I sell you a service for ₹1 lakh.
I can tell you:
“Transfer the money to this account and send me the screenshot.”
Technically, the payment can happen.
But now compare that with receiving a proper invoice from a registered business, opening a Razorpay or Stripe payment link, paying using your preferred method and automatically receiving confirmation.
Those two experiences don’t create the same impression.
Especially when the customer doesn’t know you yet.
I have seen this repeatedly while selling internationally.
Customers look for trust signals.
Your website matters.
Your business email matters.
Your proposal matters.
Your company name matters.
Your invoice matters.
And the way you collect money definitely matters.
When we created the US entity, accessing the payment infrastructure we needed made selling globally much easier.
Stripe, PayPal and proper company banking meant we could present ourselves the way an international customer expected a serious business to operate.
The same concept applies in India with payment infrastructure such as Razorpay.
This is why I don’t consider company incorporation purely a legal activity anymore.
It is part of go-to-market infrastructure.
My Experience Incorporating in the US
I don’t want to make this sound like forming a US company requires clicking one button.
It doesn’t.
There is paperwork.
There are filings.
There are decisions around entity structure.
There are ongoing tax and compliance responsibilities.
Depending on who owns the business and where they live, there can also be cross-border taxation and regulatory considerations that need professional advice.
But my experience getting started was surprisingly straightforward.
I was sitting in India.
The company was being incorporated in Delaware.
Within roughly 20 to 25 days, we had moved from deciding to create the entity to having something we could actually use for business.
And after that, the incorporation itself stopped occupying my mind.
That is the key difference.
I didn’t wake up every few days wondering what paperwork I needed to physically complete next.
I could focus on:
How do we acquire more customers?
How do we improve the product?
How do we increase revenue?
How do we build the team?
How do we make customers stay?
The legal entity became infrastructure in the background.
That’s exactly where I believe it should be.
Then We Tried Building the LLP in India
My expectations were completely different.
I thought:
I’m in India.
The company is going to be in India.
Surely this will be simpler.
Instead, what frustrated me wasn’t one giant problem.
It was the number of small things that kept consuming time.
Paperwork.
Documents.
Affidavits.
Signatures.
Physical requirements.
Bank visits.
Compliance.
More documentation.
Something that sounded like a small administrative task would turn into another process.
Then that process would depend on another document.
Then something else would need to be verified.
The individual requirements weren’t necessarily catastrophic.
The problem was their cumulative effect.
Eventually, I started asking myself:
Why am I spending so much founder time on this?
Founder Time Is a Business Cost
This is something I think gets missed when people calculate the cost of compliance.
Suppose a particular business process costs ₹5,000.
You might conclude:
₹5,000 isn’t much.
But that isn’t the real cost.
What if the founder spends six hours arranging the documentation?
What if somebody has to travel somewhere?
What if a bank visit consumes half a day?
What if you have to call your accountant five times?
What if another requirement appears next week?
Now the cost isn’t ₹5,000.
The cost includes attention.
And founder attention is a very expensive resource in an early-stage company.
If you’re running a small business, there probably isn’t a legal department.
There isn’t a compliance department.
There may not even be a finance team.
The founder is doing sales.
The founder is reviewing the product.
The founder is speaking to customers.
The founder is dealing with payments.
The founder is deciding where the next ₹1 lakh should go.
Every hour spent unnecessarily on administrative friction is an hour that didn’t go into growth.
Large businesses can absorb that.
Small businesses feel it immediately.
Eventually, We Decided to Stop
There comes a point where you have to separate sunk cost from business logic.
We had already spent time trying to establish the structure.
We could have continued.
We could have told ourselves:
“We’ve already come this far. Let’s keep going.”
Instead, we asked a different question.
Is this helping us scale right now?
The answer, at that point, was no.
It had become another management responsibility.
Another source of compliance work.
Another thing demanding attention.
Meanwhile, we already had a functioning business structure through which we could operate and grow internationally.
So we made the decision to stop pursuing that LLP for the time being and focus on scale.
I don’t consider that failure.
I consider it prioritisation.
One of the hardest things founders have to learn is that just because something can be done doesn’t mean it deserves to be done now.
The Strange Part Was the Geography
This was the part that kept bothering me.
I was physically sitting in India.
Yet creating a business thousands of kilometres away had felt easier than creating and operating one in the country where I lived.
That’s a strange outcome.
Think about everything India has achieved digitally.
We can transfer money instantly using UPI.
We can authenticate identity electronically.
We can make investments through a phone.
We can open financial accounts digitally.
We can pay taxes online.
We can manage enormous portions of our financial lives without touching paper.
Indian consumers have become accustomed to incredibly smooth digital experiences.
That raises expectations.
When the experience of operating a business still involves unnecessary physical or repetitive processes, the contrast becomes obvious.
Compliance Is Necessary. Friction Isn’t Always Necessary.
I am not arguing against compliance.
Businesses need regulation.
Banks need KYC.
Governments need taxation.
Companies need accountability.
Fraud needs to be prevented.
Customers need protection.
Anyone running a serious company should expect to maintain records and follow the law.
The question is whether every piece of friction actually contributes to those goals.
If my identity has already been digitally verified somewhere, why should another routine process require the same information manually?
If a document already exists in a government database, why should entrepreneurs repeatedly reproduce it?
If a process can safely be completed digitally, why should physical presence remain the default?
There should always be a simple question behind a compliance requirement:
What risk is this requirement solving?
If there is a strong answer, fine.
If the answer is simply:
“This is how the process has always worked,”
then maybe it deserves another look.
This Is Becoming More Important Because Companies Are Becoming Easier to Build
There is another reason this conversation matters now.
The technical cost of starting a company is falling rapidly.
A few years ago, building a serious software product might have required a substantial engineering team.
Today, two technically capable founders with AI tools, cloud infrastructure and modern development frameworks can build surprisingly sophisticated products.
Even non-technical founders can move much faster than they could five years ago.
Design is easier.
Coding is getting easier.
Content creation is easier.
Cloud infrastructure is cheap.
Global communication is practically free.
Customers can be anywhere.
Teams can be anywhere.
And increasingly, the legal entity can be somewhere different too.
That means countries aren’t only competing for large multinational corporations.
They are competing for founders.
Founders Can Vote With Their Incorporation
If an entrepreneur in Bengaluru can build a product for American customers, hire someone in Pune, work with a designer in Poland and incorporate the company somewhere else, geography starts behaving differently.
The founder doesn’t always have to put the legal entity where he lives.
That makes ease of business formation strategically important.
If jurisdiction A says:
“Give us the required information, verify everything, pay the appropriate fee, follow these clearly defined rules and start building.”
And jurisdiction B introduces far more operational friction before the founder can become productive, some founders will choose A.
Not because they dislike jurisdiction B.
Because startups are always short on time.
This is especially true before product-market fit.
Every unnecessary delay matters.
Incorporation Has a Direct Relationship With Customer Trust
Another thing I learned from this experience is how strongly operational infrastructure affects customer perception.
When we were operating internationally, having a proper US business structure made many interactions easier.
A customer sees a legitimate company.
Contracts are signed with that company.
Payments go to that company.
Invoices come from that company.
Payment processors recognise that company.
Everything connects.
Compare that with an early-stage founder improvising payment collection.
You may have exactly the same skills.
Exactly the same product.
Exactly the same ability to deliver.
But the buying experience feels different.
For B2B customers, that difference can absolutely affect conversion.
Especially if they are paying you for the first time.
This is why governments that want more startups should think beyond incorporation numbers.
The goal shouldn’t just be:
“How many companies were registered this year?”
A better question is:
How quickly can a legitimate founder move from an idea to accepting the first real customer payment?
That is much closer to what entrepreneurship actually feels like.
The Real Cost Is Delayed Go-to-Market
Every founder talks about go-to-market.
Marketing.
Sales.
Distribution.
Pricing.
Product positioning.
But there is another GTM layer that doesn’t get discussed nearly as much.
Can you accept money?
Can you issue a professional invoice?
Can your customer onboard you as a vendor?
Can you sign a contract?
Can your business receive international payments?
Can an enterprise finance team verify you?
Can you access the financial infrastructure required for your business model?
Until those things work, your go-to-market engine isn’t actually complete.
A beautiful product without the ability to transact professionally isn’t a functioning business.
That’s why I believe business incorporation should be treated as commercial infrastructure, not just legal infrastructure.
The Delaware LLC Wasn’t “Better” in Every Possible Way
I also want to be careful about one conclusion.
I’m not saying every Indian entrepreneur should create a Delaware LLC.
That would be terrible advice.
Different entities exist for different purposes.
Tax consequences differ.
Compliance obligations differ.
Fundraising requirements differ.
Foreign ownership rules matter.
Where you live matters.
Where the company earns revenue matters.
Your customers matter.
Your long-term plans matter.
An Indian LLP may be exactly the right structure for one business and completely wrong for another.
A private limited company may make more sense for someone else.
Another founder may have an India incorporation experience completely different from mine.
This article is about my experience, not a universal rule.
My point is that the difference in operational friction surprised me.
And I think that experience is worth discussing.
Would I Start Another Company in India?
Absolutely.
I haven’t lost interest in building businesses in India.
Quite the opposite.
I still believe there are enormous opportunities here, including in sectors where government, enterprise and technology intersect.
If the commercial opportunity requires an Indian entity, I’ll create one again.
But next time, I would approach it differently.
I would make sure there was a clear revenue reason for incorporating.
I would have proper accounting and compliance support from the beginning.
I would budget both money and management time for administration.
Most importantly, I wouldn’t create an entity simply because having another entity felt like progress.
I would ask:
What does this company structure enable me to do that I cannot do today?
If the answer is meaningful, then it’s infrastructure worth building.
What I Learned as a Founder
My biggest lesson from the entire experience is simple:
Starting a company and building a company are two completely different things.
The first should enable the second.
When incorporation, banking and compliance work smoothly, founders barely think about them.
That’s good.
The entrepreneur can spend his time doing things that generate value.
Talking to customers.
Building products.
Creating jobs.
Finding distribution.
Improving support.
Increasing revenue.
When business infrastructure demands too much attention, it competes with those activities.
And for an early-stage company, that competition can be costly.
India Has Already Proved That It Can Simplify Complex Systems
This is why I’m optimistic rather than pessimistic.
India has already solved problems that many countries haven’t solved at our scale.
Look at UPI.
Something incredibly complicated underneath feels almost invisible to the user.
You scan.
You pay.
Done.
That’s what great infrastructure looks like.
The complexity still exists.
The user simply doesn’t have to carry it.
I would love to see the same philosophy applied more aggressively to entrepreneurship.
Let the regulation exist.
Let the verification happen.
Let the systems prevent fraud.
But hide as much unnecessary complexity from a legitimate founder as possible.
Let someone verify themselves once.
Let government systems communicate with each other.
Make physical paperwork the exception.
Make digital workflows the default.
Make compliance proportional to risk.
And let entrepreneurs get back to building.
My Final Take After Building on Both Sides
My Delaware LLC took around 20 to 25 days to become operational while I was sitting in India.
We then built a real business around it, and that business continues to operate successfully today.
Our India LLP experience went in a very different direction.
The amount of administrative and compliance friction eventually became difficult to justify at that stage of the business, so we stopped pursuing it and returned our attention to growth.
I still want to build more from India.
I still want to explore Indian projects.
I still believe there is an enormous opportunity here.
But the experience taught me something I didn’t fully understand before.
Ease of doing business isn’t something you measure only in government reports.
A founder feels it.
You feel it when you open the bank account.
When you try to activate the payment gateway.
When you need another document.
When you lose an afternoon to something that should have taken ten minutes.
And you definitely feel it when you compare that experience with starting a company somewhere else.
For me, the lesson wasn’t that entrepreneurs should leave India.
The lesson was that if we want more entrepreneurs to build global businesses from India, we should make sure their limited time is spent building those businesses.
Not managing avoidable friction.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can an Indian founder incorporate a Delaware LLC?
Indian founders can establish businesses in the United States, including Delaware entities, depending on their circumstances. However, cross-border ownership can involve Indian and US tax, reporting and regulatory obligations, so professional advice should be taken before choosing a structure.
Is a Delaware LLC better than an Indian LLP?
Not necessarily. They are different legal structures created for different environments. The right choice depends on ownership, taxation, customers, fundraising requirements, business activities and where the founders intend to operate. This article describes my personal operational experience with both.
How long did my Delaware LLC incorporation take?
In my case, the setup took roughly 20 to 25 days from the point where we decided to move forward until we had the entity and supporting setup required to begin operating.
Why does company incorporation matter for a SaaS or service business?
A registered entity can help with business banking, payment gateways, contracts, professional invoicing, vendor onboarding and customer trust. These are important parts of the go-to-market process, particularly for B2B and international businesses.
Does professional payment infrastructure improve customer trust?
In my experience, yes. A customer receiving a professional invoice and paying a registered business through an established payment provider generally gets a more credible buying experience than being asked to use an informal payment arrangement.
Would I incorporate another company in India?
Yes. If the commercial opportunity requires an Indian entity, I would absolutely incorporate again. I would simply plan more carefully for compliance, professional support and the management time required around the entity.
Disclaimer: This article describes my personal experience as a founder. It is not legal, accounting or tax advice. Business incorporation and cross-border ownership can have significant regulatory and tax implications, so founders should take qualified professional advice before selecting an entity or jurisdiction.