Legal, Healthcare, Accounting and Payroll

We’re about 1.5 months in to building Customer.io and we’ve had pain we’ve had to overcome with supporting services. Some we expected. Some we were surprised to find.

Here’s how I wish our supporting services were:

Healthcare

Think Hipmunk for Healthcare

You’re able to compare each plan apples to apples. Pick the one we want, and fill in a one page form. Then click submit, put in payment info and you’ll immediately have coverage for your company.

Legal

Standardization of documents

Industry accepted standard docs for everything an early stage company needs.

Like:

• Oh, you’re a startup delaware c-corp? Here’s your incorporation package, and 83(b) election that you need to file. You’ll want to authorize 10m shares at $0.001 par value.
• Want to do a convertible note financing? Here’s a doc you just need to fill in the blanks.

I love our lawyer, but it just seems to me that especially at the very early stages, every technology startup company is pretty much the same.

Accounting & Bookkeeping

Not quickbooks

Synced to the relevant bank accounts. All expenses are hooked in to Expensify and automatic. The only human interaction is to go through and double check things at the end of the month.

Payroll

Simple. Automatic

Sign up online for a few dollars a month per employee. Add the employees you need to pay and a zip code to calculate withholding. The employer gets a reminder to pay, goes online to do it. It hooks in to get the balance from your bank account to make sure you don’t overdraft. Employees can log in to see their payment history. There is no paper.

One of our biggest pains of starting a company are these supporting services. The people who help us through it all are wonderful, but the industries in which they operate are creating wasted time and crushing the spirits of everyone trying to start something new.