Ask HN: Anyone moved outside of the US to bootstrap your business?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=751742

by larrykubin • 17 years ago

56 77 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm curious if anyone here has moved from an expensive city in the U.S. to a city in Panama, Costa Rica, or somewhere else with a lower cost of living. What was your experience like? Is it worthwhile? What are your rent/internet costs? Are there any sites dedicated to starting up this way?

ojbyrne• 17 years ago

Probably easier, and comparable in costs, to move to the rural midwest - e.g. South Dakota. Or Detroit.

colinplamondon• 17 years ago

Yeah, but then you have to move to South Dakota or Detroit.

mofey• 17 years ago

The advantage there is that you can date women that farm!

zeckalpha• 17 years ago

I'm half way in between. Good ol' Minnesota.

elsewhen2• 17 years ago

You might also consider one of the no-income-tax states like Texas, Florida or Nevada in case your startup starts to make some money. Moving out of Silicon Valley (with the top state tax rate over 9%) can be a big money-saver.

rumpelstiltskin• 17 years ago

Texas doesn't have a state income tax?

suvike• 17 years ago

Add Washington to that list as well.

hachiya• 17 years ago

And don't forget New Hampshire and the free state project.

patio112• 17 years ago

You may want to bend the ear of these guys:

http://www.expatsoftware.com

I have lived abroad for the last couple of years. It is a wonderful experience. There are much, muuuuuuuuuuch easier ways of reducing your burn rate, if that is what matters to you. One simple one is taking your fluent command of the English language, American passport, and familiarity with all the local systems and relocating to anywhere in the US where the living is cheap. In St. Louis, for example, I know there are plenty of livable apartments near Washington University for about $450 or so. (When I was there it was $800 a month for a very capacious 2 bedroom apartment.) Add on another $200 for food, and we'll round it up to $1,000 so that you can take the bus to see a movie once a week and deal with life's little expenses. There, that's your ramen profitable number.

It is absurdly easy to sell that much a month, if you actually sell stuff.

_cbsz• 17 years ago

2-bedroom apartments near the University of Michigan's North Campus in Ann Arbor can also be had for ~$800-1000/mo, if you're willing to put up with apartments that have had a series of students (i.e., people who are probably less likely than average to take good care of their residence) living in them. We have an emerging tech startup scene, but you'll have to budget some extra for heat. I don't know how much for heat because I am very rarely home, so I don't turn the heat above 60.

wheels• 17 years ago

We've been out in the valley for the summer, certainly living on less than $1000 per person. You just need roommates and a willingness to live in the cheap part of town. My share of the rent is $400.

Going to another country is sexier, but also more distracting.

adatta02• 17 years ago

We're by Tufts in Somerville, MA. You can get a pretty reasonable place for 600-700, assuming roommates aren't an issue. About a 5 minute walk to Davis Square and then a hop and a skip to either Harvard or MIT.

revicon• 17 years ago

Ok, I'll bite. I'm a software developer, 10 years of web dev experience, and I can't fathom a business idea that would "absurdly easily" make me a grand a month. But I have little experience in entrepreneurship as of yet. Mind giving me a few pointers?

patio112• 17 years ago

There are a lot of business models out there. I'm sort of partial to making software people want and then selling it to them. If that sounds interesting to you, I have a blog linked in my profile.

abalashov3• 17 years ago

Nothing is "absurdly" easy. No, $1000 is not an incredibly difficult monthly recurring revenue number to achieve, but to say it is "absurd" or even "easy" unless you're a marketing guru with considerable capital and resources at your disposal is preposterous.

APLonDrugs• 17 years ago

Agreed.

lionheart• 17 years ago

The way I see it, there's really no need to move out of the country to reduce your burn rate. I'm 99% sure that the inevitable culture shock and myriad other issues that come with living in a new country cancel out any benefit you get in terms of cost of living.

If you move out of the bay area and live like a college student, that should be more than enough to bring your expenses to a bare minimum.

I know its not hard to find a room in my local college town for under $400 a month. And thats right by the university. I assume that somewhere further out in the boondocks you can get a place for even cheaper.

rjurney3• 17 years ago

I second this. I'd have been better off in a piece of crap apartment in an undesirable area, rice and beans and a motorcycle, plus access to brain power in the bay area.

lsc3• 17 years ago

The bay area is the center of the universe, well, for my people. I think living here and needing a part-time job to pay the bills (part-time jobs pay twice as much here as anywhere else, btw) is a better choice than moving to the midwest, or even Sacramento.

codyrobbins3• 17 years ago

Not to mention the cost of airfare for the inevitable trips back home for holidays, weddings, funerals, etc.

jaaron2• 17 years ago

I can confirm that you'll lose a fair bit of momentum in the move. In the long term, it can be great. But in the short term, you'll increase your burn rate and your work can stop all together as you figure out the rules of working in the new country.

ArcticCelt• 17 years ago

To anyone interested to learn the cost of living in different places, I live in Montreal (Canada) and think it's a god damn cheap place to live. I pay $405 for a spacious 3 1/2 with parking (+$45 electric bill). There is plenty of entertainment in this city too. Also as a Canadian I don't have to worry about health care. So if you ask me, I think I am in a good spot for a start up.

larrykubin• 17 years ago

Is it important to be able to speak French there?

transburgh• 17 years ago

Not essential, but does not hurt to know common phrases

staunch2• 17 years ago

What does 3 1/2 mean?

colbyolson• 17 years ago

I believe he means three and a half bedroom, though normally they also give the number of bathrooms too. Eg: 3 bedroom, 2 1/2 bathroom apartment.

edb2• 17 years ago

It's Montreal for 1 bedroom, 1 kitchen, 1 livingroom and a bathroom.

elai• 17 years ago

In comparison to urban BC, where a studio costs $850 (in a nice building in a nice suburb), and $15 electric. I just checked craiglist, and it seems like your rent is at least $200 cheaper than everywhere else. Rent has gone up by several hundred dollars everywhere in canada it seems.

pasbesoin• 17 years ago

Do you know any U.S. tech types who've made the move up there, and what their experience has been like?

I spent a week in Montréal for the 2001 Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC) followed by some sightseeing, and while it was sweltering and they had us stuffed in the McGill dorms (no A/C; needed to keep the window open) while Katie Holmes' latest movie was filming night scenes all night long outside (wishing I could close the window), it was still a great week and a wonderful city experience.

I was a bit clueless, and I really owe it to the local Perl community for being gracious enough to put up with me. If any of you are on here, cheers!

Edit: More than a bit, really.

brown• 17 years ago

I'm currently operating in Manila. Low cost of living. Extremely cheap local labor (hiring system admins for about USD$5k per year). People speak English well. Very American-ized environment, so minimal culture shock. There's a growing call center culture here, so bandwidth is pretty reliable. VC community is small but active. Manila lacks a big talent pool of software engineers. We've been experimenting with setting up an office in India as well to remedy that problem.

I was in Beijing for about 6 months. I would not recommend that unless you either (a) speak Mandarin fluently or (b) plan on staying there for the long haul. Engineers were highest quality I've seen though.

garply• 17 years ago

I'm in Beijing to cut costs and recruit team members. Ditto on both points a and b.

trevelyan• 17 years ago

Hard to recruit anyone if you don't have contact information in your profile. I know some people who might be able to help you out. Feel free to get in touch.

terpua• 17 years ago

I'm also in Manila. Would love to meet up. Email in profile.

rjurney3• 17 years ago

Yes. I moved to Goa to prototype a process-flow document organization system for attorneys, for my first startup. The plan was to... get clients and then build the full deal in Bagnalore. I talked about it... here: http://www.hackerne.ws/item?id=518075 The 'paper' on the product is here: http://lucision.com/legal/Hammurabi_Writeup.pdf It never took off.

The short version is: you can't ALL leave. Someone needs to be near your market, whatever that is. You've got to be iterating products. Even for an internet company, I am skeptical that this can be done in isolation.

That being said, Costa Rica or some place cheap to get to/from is probably a better idea than... India :)

All in all, it was a great experience. I... learned Java, did a lot of catching up on things like design patterns to be able to work in Eclipse, etc. I learned... those startup things you learn the first time round. But being stuck in India when my attorney friend stopped answering my emails meant I was SOL on that product concept, and I could not iterate from India. I ended up doing something entirely different, but I couldn't even get to another product idea from there. I had to come home.

YuriNiyazov• 17 years ago

The balsamiq guy did; he went back to Italy, but he's a native Italian, so ymmv

lsc3• 17 years ago

the SF bay area has enormous quality of life advantages for the common nerd, when compared to anywhere else I've lived.(granted, which only includes other parts of the US.) - but just on a personal level, being a nerd is a very lonely thing most places, and that loneliness gets distracting after a while. In the bay area, you are no longer weird or different. Hell, I can walk down the street to the hacker dojo, and be the dumbest guy in a room full of people (well, maybe not the dumbest, but certainly below average. My point is that in the central valley, it was pretty rare to meet others with my mental abilities. The bay area teaches me humility.)

I think this might have something to do with the disparity in wages; standards are just higher around here. Yeah, you pay more for a person, but the pool from which you can hire is so much richer. if you can choose good people, you can get better deals in the bay area than most other places.

codyrobbins3• 17 years ago

I live in Honolulu and New York City, so I'm not qualified to give advice regarding choosing domiciles with cost of living in mind =)

But I do always see ads in the Wall Street Journal enjoining people to move their businesses to Moldova for a variety of attractive reasons — low cost of living being one of them if I remember correctly.

lionhearted3• 17 years ago

Hey, do you have any feedback on where would be acceptable to short-stay live in Hawaii? I've had a hard time sorting out which islands/neighborhoods would be good to spend a couple months on, any input would be massively appreciated.

codyrobbins3• 17 years ago

It depends on what you're looking for. Oahu has all the amenities since Honolulu is a pretty big city, but there's still plenty of beautiful beaches and rural places elsewhere on the island. There's also a small but blossoming tech scene in Honolulu. If you want complete peace and quiet, then I would suggest the Big Island or Maui. The Big Island is like being in the middle of the Everglades in Florida, with a few small towns and nothing for miles. Maui is a little more suburban and cosmopolitan, but still somewhat rural since there's no big city like Oahu. While Kauai is absolutely beautiful, it's very small and far more touristy and commercialized — I'm not a big fan.

Renting out residential homes is technically illegal, at least on Oahu, but people still do it and you can still probably find tons of people renting out rooms in their homes for short-term stay on all the islands on Craigslist. On Oahu there are a lot of short-term accommodations in Waikiki, but Waikiki is very touristy, somewhat expensive, and most of the places are converted hotel rooms with no kitchens. A few centrally-located neighborhoods you might want to check that are relatively affordable are Manoa, Palolo, Kaimuki, and Makiki. Kailua and Kaneohe are also nice, but they're on the other side of the island and they're inconvenient without a car.

rgrieselhuber• 17 years ago

I moved to Japan, not because the cost of living is lower (though it is in some cases) but because of the opportunities I saw here.

OmarIsmail• 17 years ago

I would imagine that one of the least expensive and most practical places to start a business is your parents' house. Some people may not have that luxury but for those that do it's a major cost and time savings.

andyjdavis• 17 years ago

Im currently living in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Low cost of living. Nice relaxed environment for when youre not working.

I was previously living in Australia. Made a decent living from consulting work which may have been one of the reasons the product side of the business didn't do terribly well. Once I was out of the country consulting work got harder to get so I've had to devote more energy to products and that seems to be bearing fruit.

Apartment rent is maybe $300/mth inc net connection, water, electricity. Can get a good thai meal for $1-3. Net connection is pretty quick although the infrastructure is a bit dodgy so there is an outtage probably once a week for generally no more than an hour or two. Dont think Id host here but for your own connection its fine.

andrewtj• 17 years ago

I'm currently in Australia and am looking to head to Thailand to extend my runway. Can you offer any advice on how you found your apartment and made the move? Anything you wish you'd known before you landed?

VinzO2• 17 years ago

I am also thinking about moving to Thailand.

maneesh3• 17 years ago

I'm moving to thailand to geoarbitrage in feb/march

VinzO2• 17 years ago

How do you plan to make some income there?

alexbosworth• 17 years ago

I'm in Beijing for fun and frugality - it hits on #1 but it is getting more expensive

Many many things here are an order of magnitude cheaper than they are in the states

mahmud• 17 years ago

Time Zone differences and crappy internet access will mess you up. I don't mind hacking until 4AM, but it gets to ya when you need to be on the phone that late when everybody in your apartment building is asleep. After long exhausting business phone calls I feel like I need to leave the house and go for a drink; try doing that at 6AM without feeling like a junkie.

I found most places in Asia to be too distracting or too removed from business life. In places like Bangkok you will be hanging out with tourists and teachers, laid back crowd. In Hong Kong or Singapore, it's too fast, too over-paid and too British and annoying; you will be very self conscious and/or lonely if you're not hanging out with MBAs and other well-paid careerists.

yeti• 17 years ago

Based in Hong Kong which is a much lower cost base than US for engineers/designers, and we have a US based remote intern who helps with doing focus groups etc

Working out ok so far

jaaron2• 17 years ago

I moved to Hong Kong as well, though lately I've been in Guangzhou quite a bit.

Hong Kong is actually a great location if you're interested in China. Getting investment visas is not too difficult and living costs are similar to the US. If you're smart, it can be much cheaper.

Trying to startup in China is _very_ difficult. I wouldn't recommend it until you have some experience in the area. As such, Hong Kong is a great place to get started.

If you are going to try Hong Kong, I would suggest getting in touch with an immigration advisor as soon as possible, because you can waste a lot of time otherwise. Also, get in touch with the people at the Hong Kong Startup Association:

http://www.hksua.com.hk/

abalashov3• 17 years ago

Don't need to; Georgia is quite cheap. Even Atlanta is quite cheap compared to almost every other American city, especially the first-rate one, with very sane real estate prices except in areas like Buckhead.

But, if that's too much, head over to a college town like Athens. Can easily get a 2 or 3-bedroom apartment for $500-$600, $700-$900 if you want a rather upscale one. Salaries are low, and no shortage of college talent pool. There are a lot of townies, too; the charm of Athens seems to rub off on a lot of folks that finish college here. The University of Georgia is here - 32,000 students or more.

The broadband is good, and the living generally cheap. Real estate is by far the most expensive thing in Athens. It's somewhat annoyingly suburban outside of downtown and older historical areas, but that can be dealt with.

Honestly, I think that's a lot easier than trying to go through all the trouble of moving abroad.

maneesh3• 17 years ago

Yea, I was doing freelance programming for 1.5 yrs (moving on now to work on SEO stuff==> no more clients), I moved to Buenos Aires/Brazil to geoarbitrage, made a ton of money in relative standards and lived like a king on a relatively meager US salary. This year, off to India, Thailand, Vietnam, South Africa, and Kenya. Not a bad life :)

pageman• 17 years ago

"... Manila, Manila ... I keep coming back to Manila ..." back here doing startups after trying out Rangoon, Kabul and Dubai :)

akd• 17 years ago

You can live in a shared apartment in East Palo Alto, cook all your food at home, buy a used car, and select free entertainment options. No need for drastic actions.

joel_feather• 17 years ago

I'm currently setting up an office in Shenzhen in china, and the programmers really are high quality, and you pay them about $400 a month. It's an excellent way to keep your costs low and grow quickly - living space is nice and cheap, for the office I pay $300 a month in a space that can seat 6.

If you want more info, just send me an email! I'd like more guys to join in, so I can get bigger and nicer places. If you are up for some travel and want to work in an office, it's perfect!

AlexBlom• 17 years ago

This is interesting. Something I've always wanted to do but never had the information for (so I'm going to Canada instead - which is not at all cheaper).

Eagerly following this thread.

mbenjaminsmith• 17 years ago

Yes, part of the reason we moved back to Bangkok. Forget about operating costs, worth it just for the awesome food.

ced• 17 years ago

I've been living off my (grad school stipend!) savings for almost 2 years in Asia. I do AI research, independently. Here's the rent for one bedroom in a "decent student" shared flat:

- Montreal: 300$; dorms 250$

- University town, Germany: 250$, 180$ for the dorms

- University town, Turkey: 120$

- India, monastery guest house: 60$

- China, Kunming (mid-sized city): 80$

I've found that the cost of living is pretty much proportional to the rent. Internet costs are negligible, unless you live in a very remote place.

There's a lot to write about the experience, but in short: best decision of my life. Two years without any responsibility whatsoever, free to hack or just go biking any time of day. With the advent of the Internet, a new lifestyle for doing research and development (aka, sow the seeds of the next Google) has opened outside the constraints of academia and industry. Few people seem to be taking advantage of it.

csomar• 17 years ago

I live in Tunisia and I'm about to take a desicion: leave my studies here and move to a cheap place like Egypt.

Tunisia is not expensive, but Egypt is very cheap (3X less expensive) so bootstrapping from there will be easier. and they have good internet connection.

It's dangerous to do, because if you don't succeed returning is much more harder! So good luck if you go for it!

fascinated• 17 years ago

I'd also make sure that you honestly ask yourself the following question, when it comes to this relocation / radical burn rate reduction issue:

Can I somehow make more money with what I (we) am about to create and stay where I am (or US)?

Sure these places have cheap rent, but you also leave all your social ties behind and will be limited to a particular subset of the social fabric (expats, most likely, that either teach English or are avoiding something important by coming there). It's also distracting by being elsewhere, though often in a good way.

Diakronik• 17 years ago

I can't say anything about leaving the continent, but I'll definitely back Montreal as a great place to go. I lived there for 12 years and am looking forward to returning (now in Ottawa for grad school).

As was mentioned, the rents are reasonable (I've got a friend living in a 5 1/2---2 bed, living/dining/kitchen for about $550/month, and he's walking distance to downtown), there's a good tech culture (lots of speech & language related stuff, web companies, game studies, etc.), and the city itself is great---a mix of the best bits of North American and European culture...you can find stuff to do 24hrs/day no problem). Also, the girls are smokin'.

As for language issues, I know people who are born & raised in Mtl and don't speak any French (beyond "oui", "non", "bière", "poutine"). There's a street called St-Laurent that more or less divides the city into eastside/westside. If you're on the west side, you can use English with no fear. Yes, you may run into a French Québecois who's an ass and tells you off, but it's really rare (more common in the east, though).

jasoncwarner• 17 years ago

I currently live in PHX, AZ but will be moving to Auckland, NZ in the next year. Part of the reason is bootstrapping, but there are others as well: lifestyle, getting a better balance in life, living in a safer, nicer, cleaner part of the world that is very western and modern. Beaches ;) (there are quite a few others as well).

I've done TONS of research on this and for me and my family, NZ makes the most sense. When we get there we'll look around at the various cities and towns, but we'll start in Auckland. The great thing about NZ is English, 4 hr time zone diff to west coast of US (+ 1 day, but really a 4 hour diff) and a great lifestyle balance. Plus, who wouldn't want to go to the place voted to be the most peaceful nation on earth!!

supaspoida• 17 years ago

After visiting Costa Rica I decided this was something I wanted to do. I wrote up my idea on my blog hoping to find a team interested in the same thing.

http://bit.ly/19Ot7a

Over the weekend I found another team that is already doing something similar in Europe & was planning to relocate to South America. They've already got a profitable product just a few months after launched. We hashed out a plan to get us all down to Costa Rica in early September.

I'm very excited about the opportunity & encourage anybody who is even considering something like this to do whatever you can to make it happen!

Ask HN: Anyone moved outside of the US to bootstrap your business?

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