Hi, I'm Roy Jacobs

Introductions
#1

Hi, I’m Roy Jacobs, hailing from Utrecht, The Netherlands. Like many of you here, a long time developer but a first-time bootstrapper. My background is in computer science and human-technology interaction (i.e. interaction design, human factors), so I kinda know where you should place a button on a form.

I am currently working on my startup purely as a side project and I don’t really have anything concrete yet. I’m trying to balance doing things the clean way with doing things the pragmatic way, and that can be fairly difficult. Haven’t decided on the colour of my bikeshed yet.

The reason I’m looking at this forum is not necessarily for technical guidance but just because everything that is non-technical or non-UX is pretty alien to me. Terms and conditions? Privacy policies? Compliance? Sigh.

#2

Hi Roy,

Welcome, and best of luck developing your product.

The good news is, as long as you have a product and someone who’ll buy it, you can pay lawyers and accountants to take care of the other stuff. :slight_smile:

#3

Right, I hope so :smiley:

In order to get SOME money, though, I’d still need some of these things in place. I heard that Stripe has some nice default T&C and privacy policy templates, but I’ve been unable to find them yet. I’m sure people here will have some other resources as well.

#4

I recommend erring towards pragmatic. If you wait until your product is perfect, you will never launch. You can always go back and re-do/re-factor later. Also it is easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission. ;0)

#5

The T&Cs I’ve seen have varied quite a bit depending on the service offered, the industry, and the expectations of the customer. Privacy policies are usually more uniform, but YMMV.

Whenever I’ve been asked to help with the drafting of these kinds of things, I start by looking at competitors’ sites to get a sense for the areas that need to be covered, and then I search GitHub for “terms of service” / “privacy policy” to serve as a starting point and modify as needed. (It’s usually a good idea to draft the first version yourself and only then bring it to a lawyer to review.)

P.S. - I’m not a lawyer. I am not qualified to give legal advice.

#6

Welcome, Roy. What is your product idea?

#7

Thanks for the advice, all!

@jasonswett It’s an infrastructure thing aimed at developers. Kind of like Cloudmailin but with FTP instead of e-mail. It’s one of those things that’s pretty useful to have when you’re doing a SaaS app but all the existing providers are pretty limited (or only allow you to spin up an FTP server in the cloud, which is too low-level for most people).