How I Registered My Business
When I started making my own products, I wanted to establish the business as soon as possible. I had to lower the barriers to entry as much as I could, so I opted for the simplest solution: the French solopreneur status (also known as micro-business, micro-entrepreneur, or also auto-entrepreneur).
Registering a micro-business in France is free and easy to do, and you only pay taxes if you perceive revenues from your activities. The only downsides are that 1) the revenues are limited to 70k€/81k$ per year without taxes and 2) you are personally liable for business debts.
Fortunately, none of those conditions was a problem for me: tech businesses are the cheapest businesses to launch, so there was no risk involved. Nowadays, you can build an online business for less than 50 bucks. If I ever get enough revenues from my products to hit the upper limit, I will have enough money to scale since the gross margin of a tech business is so profitable.
To register a micro-business in France, you just need to declare it on lautoentrepreneur.fr by filling up the online form.
You then receive an official certificate by snail mail issued by INSEE, the national statistics bureau of France, containing your French business identification number (SIREN/SIRET) between one and two weeks later.
Once the business is officially registered, you have to open a dedicated bank account to receive and send payments. My personal bank being too expensive and antiquated, I choose an online bank, Revolut, and opened a global freelance bank account for free. It made sense to choose Revolut as my customers would not be limited to one specific country (multi-currency accounts without bank fees) and I would receive payments by Stripe (the integration between Revolut and Stripe is clear and simple, a real breeze to work with so far). Stripe is an online payment tool suite that makes it easy to get paid from your own app.
When I subscribed to Revolut Business, I automatically entered the business application queue. At first, seeing that 400+ people were standing before me, I was afraid I would never be able to open a bank account before the beginning of my activity, but, as soon as I logged in the customer support hit me up from the online chat located in my online account, asking about what I intended to do with my professional bank account and for documents to prove that my business really exists. Two days later, the bank account was ready to use.
I started the process at the end of June 2018 for an official launch statement on July the 15th. I received my business identification number at the end of July, and opened my bank account at the end of August.
In the meantime, around mid-May, I started developing my first tech product as an indie maker, PyroHabit. By September, PyroHabit integrated Stripe and was ready to launch, so the infrastructure was complete in order to receive my first payment.
My business costs as of today are still really low :
- Green web hosting on a2hosting.com: $27 per month
- domain names: about 8.90€ per year / 0.75€ per month
- Mail hosting / 5 pro email addresses on Infomaniak: $2 per month
- Revolut bank account: $0 per month
- Github account: $0 per month
For less than $30 per month in operational costs, you can launch three web apps. The cost of five Big Macs in France.
If that’s still too much for you, here is a list of free resources you can use to launch your own online business at a fraction of my costs, using, for example, no-code tools, but it’s never been cheaper and easier to become a tech entrepreneur, and that’s empowering.