The first step if you are going to do business is to register a legal entity. This is actually not difficult to do and certainly easier than in Russia. At home, when registering an LLC, my partner and I had to collect a lot of papers and have it all certified by a notary.
For a person who cannot sign the same thing twice because he has completely forgotten how to write with a pen, this was quite a quest.
In the States, everything can be done remotely, but there are some nuances. Firstly, if you work on obtaining a visa and creating a company at the same time, then it is highly likely that you will do everything from your own country. It is also highly likely that a visa lawyer “luckily” knows lawyers for starting a business – and how convenient it is to do everything in one place.
The first time I did exactly this and paid $3,500 to open a company. This is, of course, a complete scam, but I realized this after moving. We opened the second company ourselves, and it was much cheaper. But we were not able to avoid difficulties either.
Since I didn’t want to pay lawyers anymore, I decided to use Stripe Atlas to open a company. But it didn’t work out, it turned out that they don’t work with Russian citizens (as well as with residents of Somalia, Iran and North Korea). I had to use the Clerky service. But in any case, the whole process cost about $700.
In general, if I register any more businesses, I will do without intermediaries. All the necessary documents and instructions are on the websites of the business development department (Divisions of Corporations) of specific states. For example, here’s how much it costs to create your own company (LLC – similar to LLC) in Florida, where I live:
