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What power would hell have if those imprisoned there could not dream of heaven?
– Sandman, Preludes and Nocturnes

My friend Noble and I started the Market Sentiment newsletter four years ago. For three years, we’ve had an American company. For two years, we’ve had an Indian one. This is the story of why we started two companies and the stark difference in our experiences.

Market Sentiment started as an experiment. In December 2020, a small group on the internet called WallStreetBets created something spectacularly chaotic in the stock market. This group discovered that wealthy investors on Wall Street were manipulating the stock prices of mediocre companies using huge amounts of money.1 Small investors teamed up and messed with the wealthy investors by coordinating as a group and fighting back. All of a sudden, a company called Gamestop that had zero prospects was everywhere on social media and its stock price surged up, making a lot of ordinary people very rich and a lot of wealthy investors very sad.

This was a time when there was a lot of interest in the stock market. People wanted to know which stocks other people were talking about. Noble created a dashboard to monitor stocks that were trending on social media (which is still live) called “Market Sentiment.” I had just quit my job as a software developer at Tesco, and I pitched in to make the website faster and more reliable.

We started writing the Market Sentiment blog as a way to bring traffic to the website. If more people visited the website, we could probably run ads on it or charge a subscription for it. We could add more features to it and make it a full-fledged product. But we noticed that people liked our research and articles on the US stock market more than the dashboard itself. So the Market Sentiment newsletter became our focus.

Making money

When Market Sentiment hit 10,000 subscribers (around six months after we started), companies wanted to advertise on it. We were kind of surprised at the rates they were willing to pay, but we found out later that we were undercharging – it was the bull market of 2021 and companies wanted to throw money into marketing. Good for us.

We needed a bank account to receive the money, and for that we needed a company. All of our sponsors were American companies, so it made sense to start a US-based company.2 We were based out of India. Was it possible to start an American company? Turns out it was.

Stripe, the payments company, has a platform called Stripe Atlas that lets founders in most countries remotely incorporate a company in Delaware, USA. The process takes only a few minutes – with a passport and a few documents for identity verification, we needed just $500 to submit our application3. We had two options to open a bank account: Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) or Mercury Bank. We tried opening an account with SVB as it was the more prestigious bank, but they wouldn’t accept us because we had no funding.4 Mercury was more egalitarian and let us open an account with no problems. We’ve loved using Mercury ever since.

From submitting our first application to opening our bank account, it took us less than three weeks to start receiving payments. We did all of this from home in India.

Bringing the money home

Making the money was one thing, but we had to bring it home at some point. We thought this was straightforward – after all, we owned the company, we earned the money, so what was the problem, right? But we discovered that inward foreign payments to India all need to be approved by the Reserve Bank of India. Since we owned the company, it was considered a foreign investment, and we had to clear something called ODI approval.

If that sounds like Greek, it did to us as well. We hired an accountant to help us with the process and expected the process to be as smooth as opening a bank account in the US. How naive of us.

Over the next three months, Noble and I had to print and fill in over 200 pages of documentation. I was in Ooty and he was in Bangalore, and coordinating this was a huge waste of time. We didn’t understand why Americans needed only our passport to trust us, but Indian institutions insisted on every small piece of documentation stopping short of our horoscope. Documents would be repeatedly rejected because of a spelling error or because the company seal was missing some crucial word. We would remake the seal, stamp it, and send it – and then our accountant would tell us that a signature was missing on 2 out of 200 pages and we would have to resend them.

Our payments were accumulating in the US bank and we would ultimately have to pay taxes in India, but they just weren’t letting us bring it here. After 6 months of back-and-forth, we finally had the ODI approval.

Bank troubles

We were now permitted to withdraw money to India. That wasn’t the end of it though. Every time we withdrew money, we had to submit three forms, wait for five days, call up our bank manager5 , explain our business model, explain who was paying us, and finally get the money. And then we had to do it all over again the next time.

We went through these shenanigans for a year. Market Sentiment was growing, and in Jan 2023, we switched from a sponsorship-based model to a subscription model. Subscription revenue would be more consistent and we wouldn’t have to waste our time looking for sponsors and convincing them (another story, I’ll write about it another time). Meanwhile, we were also getting consultancy writing projects where we worked with the same client for over 6 months. I had also moved to Bangalore.

One of the reasons we had started a US company was because our sponsors changed every 2-3 months and it would be easier for US clients to send us impromptu payments. But once we had longer term clients, it made more sense to get the payments directly to India. We would save on taxes. So in April 2023, we decided to start an Indian company. How hard could it be?

Very hard.

The Indian company

The company registration took about a month. After the registration, we went to a private bank who asked for another set of 20 documents. Our liaison at the bank said he needed proof that the company was registered. We asked our CA. Our CA said there was a problem with the portal, so we had a company but we had no proof. We yelled at the CA. The CA cut the call. This happened a few times before the portal started working and we got the proof of registration. We went back to the bank. The bank said “All this is fine, we need the original deed.” We got them the deed. They said the deed had to be notarized. We tried to get that done in Bangalore. But our company’s permanent address was in Kerala, so the notarization had to be done in Kerala. We tried arguing, cajoling, and reasoning with the bank.

We were working with the corporate sector of the bank which handled companies with ₹200 Crore in annual revenue. If we had 200 crores, we would have bought a bank ourselves to avoid going through this hell. Anyway, they stopped picking our calls. We had no option but to travel to Kerala.

Noble and I went to Kerala in November 2023 and got the deed notarized. To get a fresh start, we approached another bank, a public sector bank this time in a scenic location on the banks of a river. They welcomed us warmly and gave us tea, coffee, and whatever we asked for. They assured us we were in safe hands. We did get our bank account in a month or two after that and we started receiving payments. Since then, for 14 months:

• We have been asking for a corporate debit card.

• We have struggled using the netbanking UPI to pay for company expenses.

• We have been complaining that our GST number isn’t being recognized.

The guy who gave us tea and coffee with warm smiles doesn’t even pick up the phone. The final straw that made me write this article is that we talked to another bank whose representative assured us that they would give us excellent service, netbanking, a card, and everything we asked for. We started the process of opening a new account a month ago – and now we’re ordering printouts on Blinkit everyday redoing our sign and signature on a new form everyday, because “the signature breached the stamp” or some such nonsense.

I’ve never had to prove my identity and citizenship as an Indian so vehemently as in the last 4 years. A lot has gone digital, but a lot hasn’t as well.

Meanwhile, we file advance tax on all our business income in India, we pay franchise and income tax in USA, do ODI and LRS compliance every year, and file our personal returns. We pay three sets of accountants whatever they quote for all these compliances because we are utter greenhorns who have no way of verifying if any of these processes are even necessary – and we’re too scared of the consequences to not comply.

Is our experience unique?

Not at all. An entrepreneur named Brij Singh moved from the Bay Area to Bengaluru trying to start an AI company, and left with frustration after 2 months of trying to register a company. I’m pretty sure that there are other stories like this out there, and when we wonder why Indians aren’t as entrepreneurial as Americans, maybe we should look at the friction we face instead of a lack of spirit.6

Starting a company in America takes $500 and three weeks.
Starting one in India takes your soul.

We were fortunate to be in a situation where we were profitable from day one, had low burn, and had an emergency fund to tide us through the time we were waiting for the withdrawal of our money. We were completely bootstrapped with no external funding. We’ve always managed to pay our interns and contractors on time. But I shudder to imagine a founder in high-debt with a tight deadline undergoing what we went through.

The funny part is, this is what I was used to all my life. I thought this was the norm when it came to doing business. I wouldn’t be so resentful if I hadn’t had the surreal experience of starting a US business through a browser window. I had no baseline to compare to, but now that I’ve seen the possibility, I can’t unsee it. After all:

What power would hell have if those imprisoned there could not dream of heaven?

If you read so far, please like the post and share it with your friends! If you subscribe to the newsletter, you will get three fun posts a week like this one I wrote about Anthony Bourdain’s worst job interview. If you want to read longer stories like this, check out “9 months of cloning a billion dollar company.”