from Hacker News

Ask HN: Did you move to a lower cost of living country to bootstrap your startup

by rvn1045 on 9/24/20, 7:36 AM with 9 comments

• by muzani on 9/24/20, 10:49 AM

  I live in a low cost of living country. It doesn't help much unless you already have substantial cash, because consulting income is lower and investors are much harder to find. Investors tend to be... dumber too, with attitudes brought over from manufacturing, where they expect you to work engineers 60 hours/week, spend 80% of your cash on marketing, hit $2000 in sales on the first day instead of the exponential curve tech does, or expand to 3 other countries before you have product market fit.

  Speaking of that last bit, you'll also face some issues with market and culture. Sometimes bringing in a productivity app into a corrupt company doesn't work, because the stakeholders want it to be unproductive. Some places you're fully expected to pay bribes. Some have a "51% local shareholder" policy and expect foreigners deposit at least a year's runway. And markets can be very different - e.g. the Malaysian one is very fragmented but also loyal because of the smaller communities, so you won't be able to easily throw money at paid marketing, but guerrilla/community marketing is more effective.

• by mmmateo on 9/24/20, 9:12 AM

  Yeah. I quit my job to work on it full-time and now I’m in North Africa living off my savings and an Airbnb’d bedroom. The quality of life is good and it at least tripled my runway.

• by scott31 on 9/24/20, 7:15 PM

  No.

• by ai_ia on 9/24/20, 10:15 AM

  Notion did similar. The guys moved to Japan and worked from there. Though Japan doesn't have a lower cost of living.

  https://www.figma.com/blog/design-on-a-deadline-how-notion-p...