# How Dodo Payments Helped CatDoes Launch Globally, Before They Even Had a Legal Entity > You don't need a legal entity to build a product. But you do need one to get paid--unless your payment processor is also a Merchant of Record. - **Company**: CatDoes - **Industry**: No-Code - **Payment provider**: Dodo Payments (Merchant of Record) - **Published**: 2025-02-01 - **URL**: https://dodopayments.com/case-studies/catdoes ## Key Metrics - **60+** -- Countries paying via Dodo - **24 hrs/mo** -- Saved on tax & compliance - **1 month** -- Launch to first intl payment --- ## The Company **CatDoes: letting anyone build a mobile app, no code required** CatDoes was born from a frustrating observation: building software has never been easier, but for most people it is still completely inaccessible. The founding moment came when a friend of the CatDoes team tried to build a mobile app for her students using AI-assisted coding tools. A week later, she came back empty-handed. The tools were powerful but still assumed technical knowledge she didn't have. That gap became the company. CatDoes is a no-code AI mobile app builder where a coordinated system of AI agents handles everything: gathering requirements, designing the UI, building the business logic, and deploying to the App Store and Google Play. Users go from idea to production-ready mobile app without writing a single line of code. Behind the product are two deeply technical co-founders based in Germany. Mahdi Nouri has been writing code for eleven years. His co-founder, Nafis Amiri, studied AI at a German university and left her master's programme to work on CatDoes full-time. Their technical depth informs every layer of a platform built specifically for non-technical people. The name tells the story: AI agents--cats--build apps on behalf of their users. The logo is their own white cat, Matan. The enterprise tier is called DogDesk. From day one, the ambition was global. With Dodo Payments powering their monetisation infrastructure, CatDoes has been able to collect payments from every continent and serve a customer base that spans across many countries. ## The Challenge Most early-stage startups treat payments as an afterthought, but CatDoes could not afford to. From the beginning, Mahdi and his co-founder knew they were building for a global audience, which meant the payment infrastructure had to be ready before the product launched. The first problem was structural: when CatDoes began accepting its earliest users, the company did not yet have a registered legal entity. For most payment processors, including Stripe, that is a hard stop. No entity, no account. No account, no payments. The second problem was compliance. CatDoes was not targeting one market. They wanted users from all continents, which meant navigating VAT in Europe, GST across Asia-Pacific, sales tax across US states, and a wide range of other rules in dozens more jurisdictions. For a two-person team based in Germany, one of the most compliance-conscious countries in Europe, this was not something they were willing to handle informally. The cost of getting it wrong was real. A startup collecting international revenue without proper tax registration faces back-payments, penalties, and legal exposure across every market where it has sold. For a product designed to grow fast and reach users globally, that liability could accumulate quickly. It was a risk neither co-founder was prepared to carry. Layering on a third-party tax compliance tool was one option but it added cost, complexity, and still left the legal entity problem unsolved. They needed a single solution that handled everything. > "We live in Germany and it's one of the strictest countries. From day zero, we thought about compliance and how we should deal with this. Tax was one of them, and it was a huge factor for us that Dodo was the merchant of record and was handling the tax for us." > > -- Mahdi, Co-Founder, CatDoes ## The Solution That's where Dodo Payments came in. As a Merchant of Record, Dodo acts as the legal seller of record on behalf of CatDoes, taking full responsibility for every transaction, including: - Tax collection and remittance, globally - Automatically handles VAT, GST, and local compliance - Chargebacks and refunds, no manual work needed - Multi-currency support across 80+ currencies and 40+ payment methods - Global coverage across 220+ countries, with no entity registration required This meant CatDoes could accept real payments from real users worldwide from the moment they launched, before a company was formally registered. Dodo stepped in as the legal layer that made that possible. Mahdi first encountered Dodo Payments via a tweet, early enough that the platform was still on a waitlist. He signed up and waited. When he later noticed Dodo was already live, he joined their Discord, asked directly why he hadn't heard back, and was personally onboarded by the CEO, who recognised him as an early believer. That responsiveness set the tone for the entire relationship. > "We didn't have a legal entity and since Dodo is a merchant of record, we could easily use Dodo even without having a legal entity. And we weren't targeting one specific market--we wanted to be global. That meant users from all continents and many different countries, and we had to support different currencies and payment methods for them." > > -- Mahdi, Co-Founder, CatDoes ## The Implementation The integration itself was straightforward. Dodo's documentation was clear and the developer experience was smooth, even at a stage when a few features CatDoes needed, like native usage-based billing, were not yet available. Rather than blocking the launch, Mahdi's team built a thin internal layer to bridge those gaps. Those features have since been added to Dodo natively, and the workaround was retired. One feature exceeded expectations: adaptive currency pricing. A single toggle in the Dodo dashboard, and every user would automatically see prices in their local currency. For a platform targeting users across dozens of countries, the impact was immediate. The moment of hesitation that comes with a foreign-currency price--will my bank process this, what is the conversion rate, is this right--simply disappeared. > "When it's a local currency and users will see 'I have to pay 20 euros' and not '$25', that feels more familiar to them. With this feature alone, you have just removed a lot of decisions in the payment process." > > -- Mahdi, Co-Founder, CatDoes ## The Results ### Launched without a legal entity and accepted payments from day one Because Dodo operates as Merchant of Record, CatDoes was able to start collecting real payments from real customers before the company was formally registered. The legal and operational layer that would normally be a prerequisite for launch was already in place through Dodo. CatDoes shipped, and Dodo handled the rest. ### Customers across every continent from the start CatDoes' first attempted payment came from Zimbabwe. Their first successful payment came from Vietnam. Today, CatDoes serves customers across all six inhabited continents--not just the major Western markets, but countries that rarely appear in conversations about global SaaS growth. That reach was possible from launch because the payment infrastructure was built for it. ### No compliance burden, no consultants, no tax anxiety Operating from Germany, with a global customer base, the compliance exposure for CatDoes could have been significant. VAT registrations across EU member states alone would have required dedicated resource. With Dodo as Merchant of Record, none of that falls on the CatDoes team. There are no filings to manage, no thresholds to monitor, no consultants to hire. The entire compliance layer was delegated to Dodo from day one. ### Smoother checkout and better conversions through localisation With adaptive currency pricing toggled on, customers across different regions see prices in their own currency. This removes friction at the point of purchase and builds confidence in the checkout flow, particularly in markets where foreign-currency transactions create hesitation. Conversion performance reflects this. ### Infrastructure built for wherever the product goes next As CatDoes evolves from a mobile app builder into a more generalised AI agent platform, the billing model will evolve too. Credit-based billing, usage-based billing, subscriptions: Dodo already supports the full range. And as agentic payments become technically viable--AI agents transacting autonomously on behalf of users--Mahdi knows it is already on Dodo's roadmap. > "Just going with Dodo is sort of like guaranteed success for your startup. We know that whichever direction we want to go, the payment infrastructure we have chosen supports it." > > -- Mahdi, Co-Founder, CatDoes For CatDoes, Dodo Payments did not just solve a compliance problem. It removed the legal and operational barriers that would otherwise have delayed or constrained their global launch entirely--and gave them an infrastructure that scales with every direction the product grows into. --- ## About Dodo Payments Dodo Payments is the billing and payments platform for AI-first companies. As a Merchant of Record, Dodo handles tax collection, compliance, billing, and payouts across 220+ countries so founders can focus on building. Features include credit-based billing, usage metering, subscriptions, one-time payments, adaptive currency pricing, 40+ local payment methods, and built-in analytics. - [Learn more about Dodo Payments](https://dodopayments.com) - [All case studies](https://dodopayments.com/case-studies) - [Pricing](https://dodopayments.com/pricing) - [Sign up](https://app.dodopayments.com/login)