The legal paperwork nobody talks about, and why it's a real business.
There's a Reddit thread in r/remotework with 199 upvotes and 94 comments. The title is 'Hired a remote dev in Poland, he ghosted us.' The top answers are a mess of contradictory advice. Multiple people admit they 'just stopped paying.' Someone asks, genuinely: 'wait, what ARE the actual steps?'
No one could answer properly. Because the answer is complicated, country-specific, and usually costs $2,000-3,000 to get from a lawyer.
That gap is your business.
The Localized Termination Assistant is a per-case SaaS tool that walks HR teams through legally valid termination workflows for international hires. You generate the local-language letter, calculate the statutory notice period, coordinate certified mail, and log proof-of-service. The user pays $99-199 per case and gets something that would otherwise take a week and a lawyer's retainer.
The insight here is timing. Companies that hire international direct employees (not through an EOR like Deel) occasionally need to terminate someone, and when that moment arrives, they're panicking. They will pay for help immediately. The willingness-to-pay is highest at peak distress, and right now there's nothing to buy.
Seriously, do not touch Cursor yet.
Build a Typeform or Notion intake form. Make it look like the real product. Ask: country, employment type, how long they've been unresponsive, whether there's a signed contract. Then at the end: 'We'll send you the exact legally valid steps + a certified mail package for $99.'
Post a genuinely useful reply in that Poland thread. Don't spam, don't pitch. Answer the question partially, then mention you're building a tool for exactly this and would they beta test. DM the 15 most distressed commenters.
Your success metric: 5 people say yes, 2 pay $99, within 2 weeks. If that happens, build the thing. If it doesn't, you've saved yourself 5-7 weeks.
For the first 3 paying customers, do it manually. Find a Polish employment lawyer on Upwork or through a law firm directory, pay them $150-200 for the case review, charge your customer $99, take the loss on purpose. You're buying validation, not margin.
Stack: Next.js, Supabase, Stripe, OpenAI API, Lob API for US/UK mail dispatch, Puppeteer for PDF generation.
Start with 3 countries: Poland, Germany, Philippines. These cover different legal traditions (civil law, strict labor protections, developing-market complexity) and represent real demand based on where international hiring actually clusters.
The core flow:
One thing to build from day one: a 'last reviewed by local counsel' date on every template. Display it prominently. This matters legally and it matters for trust.
I want to be honest about what's hard here, because the idea has real structural problems alongside real opportunity.
The unauthorized practice of law risk is not theoretical. Germany's RDG provisions and France's equivalent rules have been used to challenge automated document generation framed as legal guidance. Before you launch in those two jurisdictions, you need a pre-clearance legal opinion. That's $10,000-30,000 in legal costs you probably don't want to spend. The mitigation is framing everything as 'document templates for HR review' rather than legal advice, and making the optional lawyer review prominent. Whether that's enough in Germany is genuinely unclear.
The lawyer review add-on is also harder than it looks. Finding employment lawyers in Germany or France who will do async case reviews for $50-80 (what you need to charge to maintain margins) is an ops problem, not a tech problem. Employment lawyers doing piecework at those rates don't exist at scale in those markets. Start with Poland and the Philippines, where this is more feasible, and build the German/French network deliberately over time.
The churn pattern is worth thinking about too. Companies that successfully terminate a foreign employee feel relief, then forget about your product for 18 months. This is structurally event-driven, which makes NRR hard and VC funding harder. Your retention play is the annual plan ($499/year for up to 10 cases), positioned as insurance. Whether HR generalists will pay $499/year for a tool they used once is a real question. I'd price-test this hard.
Break-even is 18 cases per month at $99 average. That covers roughly $1,800/month in infrastructure and overhead. It's not a huge number.
Gross margin on letter-only cases is around 88%. On lawyer review cases, closer to 72% after paying your legal partner. Mail API costs run $5-15/case.
The acquisition math is good if you go organic. SEO content targeting 'how to terminate employee in [country]' is high-intent and genuinely underserved right now. Reddit and forum community presence costs time, not money. LTV/CAC via organic channels is probably 10:1 to 20:1.
Deel could build this in a sprint. They have local entity relationships, legal teams in every jurisdiction, and existing HR software integrations. The reason they haven't is that their incentive is to keep companies on full EOR at $599/month per employee, not to offer a $99 one-time product that removes the need for their core service.
That's your window. Use it for SEO depth and a real case volume before they notice the gap.
The other thing worth noting: EOR adoption is growing. The addressable market of 'SMEs hiring internationally without an EOR' might be shrinking as Deel and Remote drop their prices and improve awareness. You're building for a segment that's been told they should just use an EOR and hasn't listened yet. That's a real market, but it's not growing the way it was in 2021.
Monitor r/remotework, r/legaladvice, and r/smallbusiness. Search for: 'international hire,' 'remote employee,' 'abandoned,' 'ghosted,' 'how to terminate.' Reply with genuinely useful partial answers. DM the people who seem most distressed.
Cold-email 50 HR leads at companies currently posting international remote roles on Remotive.io. One line: 'What's your plan if one of your international direct hires goes dark?' That's it.
Post in Indie Hackers Show IH using the Poland Reddit thread as the hook. Builders will get it immediately.
The business is real. The legal complexity is real. The demand is sitting in Reddit threads right now, unanswered. Whether you can navigate the UPL risk and build the lawyer network is the actual question, and you won't know until you try.