Hey Product Hunt!

I'm Li, the founder of TopStartNow. I built this because I got tired of seeing

foreign founders get ripped off or make expensive mistakes registering US companies.

The problem I experienced firsthand:

We're launching on Product Hunt TOMORROW (July 28).

Here's exactly what we built and why it's different.

The typical foreign founder journey:

Google "how to register US LLC" 12 conflicting Reddit threads

A friend spent 2 months trying to register a US company for his SaaS.
He picked Delaware because "that's what everyone says." $300/year franchise tax. Wrong entity type. 8 IRS phone calls. $800 wasted. Two months gone. When he finally asked for help, I walked him through it in one afternoon: Wyoming LLC $60/year, not $300 Called the IRS at 6:00 AM ET on Tuesday EIN in 15 minutes Mercury bank account approved in 3 days Stripe connected by Friday Total: one week. $250. The worst part? Nobody told him about Form 5472.
$25,000/year penalty if you forget to file.
Most formation services never mention it. It's not their problem. That's when I decided to build TopStartNow. **Where we are now:** Bootstrapped no VC, no pressure to jack up prices 58 guides published covering everything from LLC vs C-Corp to Stripe setup Served founders from 15+ countries Launching on PH this Tuesday (July 28) **The biggest lesson:**
Foreign founders don't need a cheaper formation service.
They need one that doesn't lie about what comes after
"congratulations, your LLC is approved." Ask me anything #buildinpublic #solofounder #indiehacker

1. Stripe setup guide for non-US residents is live Step-by-step walkthrough: LLC EIN Mercury Stripe Covers all 10 common rejection reasons 2. USDT payment integration guide published For founders whose country Stripe doesn't support 3. sitemap submitted to Google 78 pages indexed What we're working on next:
- Direct bank account opening automation for foreign founders
- Multi-language dashboard (Chinese UI coming first) Question for the PH community: What's the ONE thing that made you hesitate before registering your US company? Drop it below 

After helping over a dozen non-US founders set up their US companies and Stripe accounts, one pattern became painfully obvious:

Most Stripe rejections aren't about you. They're about three fixable mistakes.

Here's what I learned

Mistake #1: Your industry is on Stripe's naughty list

I spent three hours trying to send a fax to the IRS. Not because faxing is hard. Because I was filling out Form SS-4, and box 7b asked for an SSN. I don't have one. I'm not American. The instructions said "foreign applicants without an SSN leave blank." So I left it blank. The fax went through. The IRS rejected it. Reason: "Box 7b cannot be empty." So I called them. At 2am my time, because that's when the IRS phone line opens. The agent was polite. She told me to write "FOREIGN" in box 7b. Not "leave blank." Write the word FOREIGN. Six letters that appeared nowhere in the instructions. --- That's when it clicked for me. Every form, every platform, every onboarding flow I'd been fighting Stripe, Mercury, the IRS, OpenAI they were all built for the default user. The default user has an SSN. The default user has a US address. The default user's name fits neatly into "first name, last name" with ASCII characters. If you're outside that default, the system doesn't fail loudly. It fails quietly. It lets you think you made a mistake. It makes you chase ghost errors that aren't errors at all just gaps between who the system was designed for and who you actually are. --- This changed how I build TopStartNow. I stopped asking "what would this flow look like for a US founder?" and started asking "what would this flow look like for someone whose name gets mangled by Romanization, whose address proof is a Chinese credit card bill, and who's never heard of Form 5472 because nobody told them it exists?" The onboarding isn't a checklist anymore. It's a walkthrough for someone who was never the default. --- I'm curious if you've built a product for users who don't fit the mold, what was the moment that made you realize the default wasn't working for them? And if you've been on the user side of this what system broke on you in a way that wasn't a bug, it was just never built for you?

A payment risk person told me something last week that I can't stop thinking about:

The #1 pre-freeze signal is NOT chargebacks. It's NOT disputes. It's a payout that suddenly shows "pending review" with no dollar threshold explanation.

And here's the part that stuck with me: almost every founder reads that as routine friction. "Oh, it'll clear in a couple of days." Then they keep shipping invoices through the same account.

What's actually happening: Stripe's risk model flagged your account not because of any single transaction but because your processing volume changed significantly. A velocity anomaly. If you normally process $2K/week and suddenly hit $10K, the model doesn't know you ran a promotion or launched a new product. It just sees the spike.

Had a three-day conversation this week that completely reframed how I think about our product. Sharing the insight here because I think it applies to a lot of international founders building for the US.

A strategist named Aryan pointed out that Asia US founders hit three failure points that a founder in London literally never encounters:

1. Non-Latin name verification

Stripe, Mercury, the IRS fax return they all choke on Asian names. "Zhang Xiaoming" or "Xiaoming Zhang"? "Nguy n" or "Nguyen"? It takes 3-4 rounds of back-and-forth before the system matches. Every time, the founder thinks they made a typo. They didn't. The systems were never designed for non-Latin names.

Just had a conversation that reframed our entire product. Wanted to share it here because I think it applies to a lot of global founders.

When a non-US founder registers a US LLC, they think they're buying incorporation. They aren't. They're buying TRUST and it has two completely separate layers:

Layer 1: Platform trust (the mechanical one)

Stripe, Amazon, Shopify, OpenAI they all want a US entity or US bank account. The LLC + EIN unlocks this. It's a binary check: either you pass or you get the "account closed" email. This is solvable with paperwork.

Day 11 of building TopStartNow in public.

We don't have a marketing team. We don't have a content writer. But we now have 36 SEO guides.

Here's why:

Every non-US founder who Googles "register US LLC" or "Stripe setup non resident" or "Form 5472 penalty" is a potential customer. They're not browsing Product Hunt. They're searching for answers at 2am because they just discovered they need a US company to get paid.