When it was time to publish my MVP for App Pause on Google Play Store, I had to make a decision: publish as an individual or a company. Publishing as an individual meant my full name and address would be plastered across PlayStore for everyone to see. This made me feel a bit uneasy, so I explored the alternative – formation of a company.
Turns out, creating a company in UK is relatively simple. The bare minimum requires simply filing up a form online and paying just 1 GBP! Now, I am not going to go into too much details on exactly what is needed in this post. There are plenty such guides online. I am just going to provide a brief summary of my journey in creating a Company.
If you create a company, then PlayStore will show the company name instead of your actual name. However, there is still a challenge that remain unsolved – PlayStore will also show your business address. If you use your home address as your business address when creating the company, then that will be shown here.
In order to hide your home address, you will thus need to use some alternative address when forming the company. Unfortunately, it’s not legal to use PO boxes for this address. The registered office address must have physical location where documents can be delivered and acknowledged. It’s going to be expensive to rent an actual office, but thankfully, there are cheaper options.
3rd Party Service for Buying Address
There are 3rd party services where you can buy registered office address. These locations are fully stuffed with people to accept any letters that arrive there and then they email the scan copies to you.
I used 1stformations to buy their Privacy Service. This package comes with a registered office address and a service address – the address connected to the director of the company. Without a service address, I, the director, would have needed to provide my home address for a place to contact with me 🤦♂️. So I had to buy both a registered office address and a service address.
All in all, I had to spend around 70 GBP to buy the addresses. It’s going to be an annual cost. Sigh.
Note, these address will only forward legal letters to you, so letters from Company House and HMRC. Any other kind of letters would NOT be forwarded to you, unless you buy another of their service. It’s all on their website. Have a look.
Creating is easy – Maintaining is a bit harder
Well, now that I have a company, what are my responsibilities? I was worried about this, but turns out this is also simple.
- Create account on Company House and enable all online safety mechanisms.
- Create a Corporation Tax account (you must do this within 3 months of company creation)
- If you collect any kind of user information, you will also have to pay money to https://ico.org.uk/ annually.
- Keep track of key events for the company decisions. I am just tracking them on Google doc.
- Keep track of all money in and out. I don’t have a bank account yet cause I am not dealing with any transactions just yet (only spending money occasionally). Once I do, I should also start using some kind of accounting software. Everything is manual for now.
- File paperwork annually: Confirmation Statement. I haven’t done them yet, but I don’t think they will be complicated either.
AI to make things easier
Throughout my journey, I have been asking Gemini questions to unblock me. Got an HMRC form to fill and unsure about some question? Juts take a screenshot of the form and ask Gemini what to answer. Most of the time, it can explain the question and what’s needed accurately. Everything about this process is public so AI has plenty of information to help out with your questions.
Publishing on Google Play Store
To publish on Google Play Store, I just had to wait one day after creation of my Company. All UK company automatically get a DUNS number, which is what you need to create a company account on PlayStore. Then I just had to pay 25 USD and my account was good to go.
Now I have complete privacy. On top of that, as a completely pleasant surprise, turns out you do not need 20 testers for 14 days if you have a company account on Play Console! This made releasing app much easier!
What’s Next
I haven’t faced any problems with my company yet. Then again, it only has been 2 months. I will wait a year before writing another update to this post.
Interested in following my journey? Please Subscribe to my monthly newsletter or give me a follow on Threads where I build in public. Have a question? Drop a comment 🙂
