Aditi Sharma

I registered Nivaan Pay as a Private Limited because every advisor said “VCs will want it.” I did not have VCs. I had a prepaid-card idea, two engineers, and a CA who answered WhatsApp after 11 pm.

The first shock was not code. It was that a payments product in India is a compliance product. We were talking about wallet versus PA versus PPI before we had a landing page. I wanted to ship a demo; counsel wanted a purpose clause and a board resolution. Both of us were right, and we wasted weeks arguing instead of making a list.

What worked: we wrote a one-page “what we are allowed to do this quarter” and stuck to it. No crypto. No cross-border. No “we’ll figure licensing later.” We used an existing aggregator for collections and built the workflow software on top — reconciliation, refunds, and the messy Excel our first merchant was living in.

DPIIT recognition was useful for conversations, not for magic tax holidays. GST registration on day one mattered more, because our first customer would not pay a proprietorship invoice.

If I were starting again I would incorporate as a Pvt Ltd, hire the CA before the fourth engineer, and treat every regulator email as product research. The founders who skip this do not look brave in diligence. They look expensive.