legal, marketing, mobile-appsWe’re a dating app company who wants to offer their services to world such as okcupid & Tinder, the question is should we register the company in each country we want to operate or we need only to register in one?
Thanks.
This is a tricky question because it depends on a lot of factors. For example the specific local legislation of the countries you want to operate in and the amount of funding you guys have.
Keep in mind that “registering” a company means legislational effort in each country, which includes lawyers for every country and sometimes a lot of paperwork. This will consume a lot of money and time to do.
CASE 1: If you need to hire people in the target countries to do for example support or translation you are sometimes even obligated to register your company.
CASE 2: If you only want to sell your app there and have no employees I do not see a reason why you need to incorporate there, but again this depends on the local legislation. And I very strongly advise to let this be checked by a local lawyer.
CASE 3: you do not have the money to register right away everywhere. In this case you should focuse on the most important markets and let the distribution of your app begin. With rising attention and possibly revenue or investments comming your way you can then further invest in expanding your apps range. This is also a good strategy if you have enogh money but do not want to waste it on lawyers to early on. Maybe one of your original target markets underperforms because of reason insert cultural difference reason here. And those reasons may not be so obviouse.
What you should definitely do is register your trademark e.g. logo and name in all countries you want to operate in or even worldwide. This will prevent imitations of your products or at least you can sue them if they imitate you.
I personally would prefer a more data driven approach like in CASE 3 but that depends as already said on you guys.
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