Zooms out beyond just incorporation to the full 'ready to sell' checklist, GST, current account, licenses, which is exactly the sequencing question new founders actually have.
Honestly answers the very first question every bootstrapped founder asks, including the narrow legitimate cases where you can delay registration and why most sellers shouldn't.
For a D2C brand, ad spend is often the biggest cost, this explains the 18% GST on advertising and how to claim it back as input credit, the maths that materially changes your CAC.
Worth checking as a boring, overlooked killer: a slow or failing UPI/payment integration at the last checkout step silently converts a would-be sale into an abandoned cart, and this is the primary source for how India's dominant payment rail (UPI, over half of digital transactions) actually gets integrated.
UPI is the dominant digital payment method in India, so a broken or slow UPI flow at checkout has an outsized effect on conversion
Under RBI rules, banks (not the merchant) absorb the UPI merchant discount cost up to a set per-transaction cap, which matters for low-AOV D2C pricing decisions
Supports 100+ payment modes (UPI, cards, wallets, netbanking) that are worth auditing directly on the checkout page, not assumed
Many Indian D2C stores run two gateways: one domestic (Razorpay/Cashfree) and one for international cards or EMI
