Should a Startup in the messy middle change TOS on every turn?

It’s a colossal waste of time. An obvious failure mode.

But I think you already know that.

The reality is, as a programmer, you’re never going to convince your non-programmer cofounder to stop wasting time and money on dumb shit.

At least it’s just $10k on a lawyer. Some people blow $100k on branding. Other $60k on executive recruiting. Wait until you get bigger and these people are booking $240k a year in expenses, putting their wives and girlfriends on payroll, renting offices and apartments downtown...

Probably depends on your deal size and risk. If you are selling puppy photo software for $10/month it is a different situation to 200k enterprise deals.

Your contracts and insurance coverage exists to protect yourself from risk. Identify your risk (severity and probability of adverse events) and act appropriately.

When you say "change routes" do you mean changing your API or application? Or change the direction of the business? Either way your initial ToS should be way more resilient to these types of changes at this stage of the business.

Resiliency + risk profiling for these changes are the name of the game. There are no hard rules, just overlapping bands of probabilities. ;)

Unless the answer to "What would you say y'all do here?" is constantly changing I don't see why the TOS should be changing. To use Patreon as an example, while the details of how their systems are built and the business is promoted is likely in a continual state of flux, what they do is somewhat fixed so the terms by which someone interacts with the business should be somewhat fixed as well. Unless you're making a big change to features or the nature of how users are to relate to your business (eg: when Slack pivoted from being a video game company to a group chat company) I think making TOS changes (even if it's what everyone else is doing) speaks to instability, leads to a lack of trust, and generally gives the impression that the company doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up.

Thanks for all your answers. It really helped to create a framework of what legal mumbo to put where.

We've decided on the following stack:

- General Terms of Service. This will describe what benefits customers can expect from us and by which general means we deliver this e.g. our core service but also support, the amount of effort, etc; what requirements customers need to fulfill before we can deliver our service (like a working internet connection), that customers may only use our service for what it is meant for and shouldn't try to hack our shit; that customers will have an obligation to pay for these deliverables and how long we are willing to wait for payment, what we do when they don't pay and other nasty stuff; How we communicate, where you can find pricing information and what happens in case of disruptions and calamities, what liabilities we accept and how we promise to handle complaints and disputes; other stuff that needs to be said like how we handle privacy sensitive data and which legal jurisdiction applies.

- Terms of service concerning generics for a certain type of business model. This can be quite short and wil lay on top of the general TOS. E.g. in case of a subscription model, how subscriptions can generally be started, how we prolong them and how customers can cancel. Which requirements a customer should fulfill before a subscription can be delivered. (like a working internet-connection) Where to find the equipment that can be used to receive our service.

- Customizable customer contracts for different target markets and business models. Again these lay on top of the business model TOS which lays on top of the general TOS so this can be really short for a simple contract and expanded at will.

I'm convinced this is a very workable method for us and will give us the flexibility that we need in this phase while still adhering to our lawyers advise.

Yes. If you are making promises to users in your non-TOS site text, you might want to run that by a lawyer too. Patreon is getting its butt handed to them because they didn't understand that. Getting your TOS checked after the legislature has met might not hurt either.

Obligatory not a lawyer disclaimer. How much is changing to require constant changes to your TOS? And, what contracts are you trying to change? Contracts with your customers? You want them to resign a contract with you every time you change something? You say "closing in on product market fit," but its not clear if that involves small iterative changes that are boosing traction or big product and direction pivots, and those probably involve very different approaches

Should? Yes.

Do the means of not doing it justify the ends of moving super quickly and likely never encountering problems and getting liquidity and cashing out all the liquidity leaving only an empty shell for customers to sue and never be able to collect from? Yes.

You should have a ToS from the start that can cover every business model from ExxonMobil to Apple. Just some bog standard bullshit to throw up on the site while you do whatever the hell you want to.