How to incorporate a US Corporation from outside USA ?

When we started Freshdesk,we decided to incorporate in the USA because that seemed to be best option for a SAAS company that wanted to handle recurring payments from international customers from day 1. Our preferred payment gateway will work only with US bank accounts and it is easier to get a US bank account if you are a USA corporation.We are based out of India and the options for accepting dollar payments with recurring billing were seriously limited and expensive.The only option seemed to be Paypal but again we were not sure if we could link Paypal with our Indian bank accounts for USA payments.

Since there were not many resources available on the web for incorporating a US corp from abroad I thought I will share our story for the benefit of future entrepreneurs.

Ofcourse there are many other ways to do this - but this is how we did it.

1. Incorporation - in the State of Delaware as a Delaware C Corp.

If you ask "Why Delaware" ? - We couldn't find anything convincing for "Why not" ?

Total cost for incorporation - $1278