The FSSAI license sat in the queue for months. Not rejected, which I could have understood and done something about. Just not moving. Every time I checked, it had somehow settled back to the bottom of the pile, behind whatever had come in after it. There was no reason given because there was no decision being made. It was a food license for a bakery, an ordinary thing, and it was going nowhere. The only way I found to move it was to keep showing up: calling, following up, making it slightly more inconvenient to ignore than to process. I had spent twenty years in supply chain before this. I had run procurement across borders. And there I was in Bangalore, learning that the way you move a stuck application is not escalation, it is persuasion, repeated.
That gap is the thing nobody puts in the deck.
Incorporation is the part someone is licensed to sell you; everything that turns the certificate into a company that actually works comes after, and nobody packages that part.
When Niklas and I decided to build Fika B’lore, a Scandinavian bakery in North Bangalore, I thought setting up the company was the boring part. You incorporate. You get a few registrations. You open a bank account. Then the real work, the baking and the selling, begins. I had read the guides. A foreign-owned private limited company in India goes through the automatic route for most sectors, no government approval needed to own it. Name reservation, digital signatures, a director identification number, the certificate of incorporation. A few hundred dollars if you use a competent firm. On paper it is a solved problem, and the firms that sell it have made it look like one.
What the guides do not tell you is that the company exists on paper for weeks before it can actually receive a single rupee.
Incorporation is the cheap part. It is also, in a sense, the easy part, because it is the part somebody is licensed to do for you. After the certificate comes the long tail: the GST registration, the FSSAI food license because we make things people eat, Udyam for the MSME status, professional tax under Karnataka, the shops and establishments registration. None of these is hard in the sense of being intellectually difficult. They are hard in the sense that several of them sit in a queue and move at the speed of someone else’s attention, and the FSSAI license was the clearest case: submitted and waiting is exactly how a thing sinks. You do not push it through with a better argument. You push it through by being present, again and again, until it is easier to process than to keep setting aside.
The part I had braced for turned out to be one of the easy ones. The kitchen lease, a commercial space in Bettahalsoor on the northern edge of the city, I had expected to be a fight, because I had read enough horror stories to expect one. It did not come. We found the space, signed, and that was largely that. You cannot tell in advance which parts will be hard. The map of where the friction actually lives is not the one in the guides.
Money was where the friction actually lived for us, and not in the way I expected. The bank account took months, for reasons no one could ever quite name. It was not refused. It just took the time it took, and the time it took was long, and every explanation I got was a different explanation. Then the payment gateway. India’s live payment rails are genuinely ahead of what I was used to in Sweden, UPI is a better everyday experience than anything I left behind, and once you are on the rails the paying is the smooth part. Getting on them is not. Every gateway now wants Aadhaar-based identity to onboard you, and Aadhaar is not a thing a foreigner gets quickly. The hard part of money in India was never the paying. It was being allowed to start.
There is a structural fact the guides mention in passing that turns out to shape everything for foreign founders: a private limited company in India needs at least one director who is resident in India. Read past quickly, it is a footnote. Lived, it decides whether two foreigners can actually hold and run their own company, what control looks like, and how the bank sees you. We had to work it out properly rather than read past it.
The FEMA side, the reporting to the Reserve Bank when foreign money funds an Indian company, can be a real piece of work. For us it mostly was not, because the capital was already in the country before we needed it, so the FC-GPR reporting was lighter than the warnings suggest. That was the pattern I kept seeing: the thing that flattens one founder waves another one through, and which is which depends on details of your situation that no general guide can know.
If there is one thing I would put above all the others, it is that the rules do not hold still. GST rates move. FSSAI requirements get revised. Something that was true when you built your process quietly stops being true, and nobody sends you a note. Our pastries sit at five percent and plain bread at nil, and even that line has shifted around us more than once. The work is not learning the rules once. It is noticing when they have changed, which is a different and more tiring kind of work, and it does not end after setup. It is the running cost of operating here.
So here is the order I wish someone had given me, not as a checklist but as an order of operations. Decide the entity and the resident-director question first, because it constrains everything after. Incorporate. Then start the slow, queue-based things immediately, the FSSAI license above all, and treat them as something you actively push rather than submit and wait on, because submitted and waiting is how they sink. Start the bank account and the payment gateway early too, because that is its own long pole: the account can take months no one can explain, and every gateway now wants Aadhaar, which a foreigner does not get fast. If your capital is not yet in India, get FEMA advice early; if it is already here, you will probably find that part lighter than the warnings suggest, as we did. And assume the rules will change under you, so build the habit of checking rather than the comfort of a setup you trust.
Which brings me to who you actually need. You need a chartered accountant and a company secretary, and at some point an advocate, and you need them to be good, because the things only they can legally do, the audited accounts, the certified filings, the FEMA certificates, the legal opinions, are the things you cannot do yourself and should not try to. That part is genuinely reserved, and that is fine. What you do not need is to hand over the judgment with it. The CA can file your GST. The CA cannot tell you, with any feeling for your specific situation, whether to enter India at all, in what order to do the next six things, or what is about to go wrong. That part is not for sale, because almost nobody selling India setup has run a company here. They processed the paperwork for the people who did.
I keep coming back to that stuck FSSAI file. We got it, in the end, the way most of these things resolve, with persistence and the right follow-up and some patience. The thing I took from it was not about food licensing. It was that the distance between a company that exists and a company that works is made of dozens of these, each small, none in the brochure, and that the distance is the actual job. I am still not sure how much of what we learned transfers cleanly to a company that is not a bakery, not in food, not us. Some of it is just ours. But the shape of it, the gap between the deck and the kitchen floor, I think that part is the same for everyone who does this, and it is what I would most want to talk to the next person about before they sign anything.