You may have a greenfield market in the trades.
Not quite an answer either, but one reason for my interest in alternative models of operation is the IETF. It is, and has been a remarkably effective organization. Thanks to them I am typing on my computer at home and sending this out. They do _not_ have members. I understand that they are not a business, but they are more effective than any software company I worked for.
Some folk find it easier to scroll through that way (it can still support header links, etc.), rather than having to click through sections of the site as required :)
That said, for long ass manuals (the 5,062 page Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual comes to mind) then PDF. Also for published papers. But for books, ePub.
For example, the Pro Git book is available in ePub, PDF and mobi. It is regularly updated.
A product suggestion for you. Something like turbotax for founding a company. Ask a series of relevant questions, then create the formation paperwork, set up the board, issue the stock, automatically sign them up with an insurance partner, payroll partner, etc.
The target audience would be a couple of people who have a really great idea and just want to get down to coding and talking to customers and building, and not dealing with all of the boring muck of legal stuff.
When I was starting companies I really wished there was something like this. Your guides are a good start, but I still have to do a lot of legwork just to get the company going!
And then once you have that, a second product -- the same thing for shutting down.
Shutting down a company is even more difficult than starting one, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of products focusing on that, even though there are almost as many shutdowns as there are startups!
Edit to add: I would gladly pay a few hundred dollars for this service, on top of the normal Clerky fees, as it would save me a ton of time. Also you could probably work out deals with the preferred partners to get some sort of referral fee.
ps. This guide is great, thank you for putting it together!
I touched on this in another comment here, but dissolution, counterintuitively, is actually a very different ballgame. There is a lot more variability in how it should be done, depending on the specific circumstances of the company being shut down. That's one of a few reasons why you don't see many products out there for this. But I completely agree it's a pain point for us to solve!
As a founder myself, I know it's easy for people to throw random ideas at you with absolutely no intention to pay for it, so I know how helpful it is to have a price anchor. :)
FWIW we have at least the banking portion of what you described worked out. The idea is that you can pre-fill your applications with banks with the information that you entered for your legal paperwork. It's not quite a one-click process due to how the best banks for startups work, but it's as easy as it gets!
https://www.angellist.com/incorporation
Included with Incorporation
Entity formation in Delaware
State filing fees
IRS Employer Identification Number (EIN tax ID)
Founder stock issuance, custom equity pool and 83(b) filings
Legal templates and founder discounts
1 free year of Delaware registered agent, $100 per year thereafter. Renews automatically
1 free year subscription to Base plan
But what I'm looking for is more involved. Ask me a few questions. Do you plan to have employees? Yes? Ok we will set you up with a payroll provider and a health insurance provider and a worker's comp provider and a business insurance provider. That kind of thing.
Sure I can go to Gusto and they can do payroll for me, but they don't do taxes. They don't do insurance. They don't do bookkeeping. And so on.
I don't want to have to look up all the things I need to do as a business owner and find all the services that do that stuff.
I want to go to one place and have a legal, compliant business.
The shutting down part is interesting and I'm not sure how/if Atlas handles that.
We've written a handbook about startup incorporation and I wanted to share it with all of you :)
There is, of course, a lot of content about startup incorporation out there already. Why did we decide to add to the pile? Honestly, I often wince when I read what's out there, because so much of it is misguided or just plain wrong. A lot of it is people with no legal expertise regurgitating the same (often misguided / wrong) information they've read/heard elsewhere. Basically, the setup for the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, except the culprits are content marketers instead of the media.
We also felt there was a need to have something comprehensive. While there's a lot of bad information out there, there is also a lot of great, accurate information. It's just usually spread across various blogs from startup attorneys, which makes it difficult to get a comprehensive view. With this handbook, our goal was to provide a central resource covering everything you need to know about startup incorporation.
A few content-related notes:
• We mention this in the handbook, but this is all written with US-based startups in mind. We fully recognize a lot of founders are elsewhere, but there's just too much to cover if we were to expand the scope to beyond the US. Sorry about that!
• The word "startup" means different things to different people. We use the word in pretty much the way PG uses it here: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
• As the name implies, this handbook is narrowly focused on startup incorporation. A lot of people don't know this, but there's a lot more to forming a startup than just incorporation, like setting up a board, issuing stock to founders, etc. We previously published a handbook called Legal Concepts for Founders, which touches on those topics: https://handbooks.clerky.com/legal-concepts
On more of a UI-related note, some personal pain points that we tried to address with our handbook design:
• It's easy to jump down to a footnote and jump back up to where you came from (just click on the footnote number).
• Every subheading is link-able, as are any callouts that you might want to link to.
• We've been very generous with linking to glossary terms so that readers can quickly learn what they need to know in order to understand what they're reading. The challenge was that regular link styling would leave the copy way too busy. To solve for this, we made each link look super close to regular text so that the linking isn't distracting. That way readers that are puzzled by a term, who might be looking at it more closely anyways, will be able to click through and learn more, and other readers won't be distracted by the link styling.
I'd love to hear any thoughts or questions about either the content or the UI! I'll be here all day to respond. Also happy to answer random questions related to startup law.
Thanks :)