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by TekMol 1345 days ago
I looked into this issue over the last weeks and made a list of other solo founders and how they handle it.

You can find many, many of them when you search Twitter for "buildinpublic".

The sad truth is that most successful solo founders these days:

1) Make it very hard to figure out where the service they provide is located.

2) When you find out, it is usually registered in a country outside of the EU. Crunchbase often helps to find the location.

Apart from the USA, Singapore and Colombia seem to be popular choices among solo founders who know what they do:

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/nomad-list

https://openstartup.tm/remote%20ok

What the discussion about GDPR usually misses is that GDPR does not only apply to Google Analytics and Google Fonts.

A web business needs a hosting solution, a CDN, a payment processor, an email solution, an A/B testing solution, etc etc etc.

If you try to handle all that inside of the EU, you are cut off from all the good tools that startups usually use.
2 comments
dewey 1345 days ago
I‘m pretty sure that’s not accurate. Not sure where they scraped that from but I think I remember it being incorporated in Singapore. Which makes a lot more sense if you follow where Pieter is usually located.
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TekMol 1345 days ago
Do you confuse Nomadlist with RemoteOK?

RemoteOK is in Singapore.

I added it to the comment now.

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dewey 1345 days ago
What's your source?
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bryanrasmussen 1345 days ago
If you're servicing the EU you need to take the GDPR into account, so I'm not sure I understand what benefit it gives you to be outside the EU unless you have a service that can refuse to serve an economically rich area of the world?
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TekMol 1345 days ago
That is the theory, but not how the web works in reality.

SaaS projects usually service the whole world. I have not found a single solo founder who does that in a way that is compatible with the GDPR.

If the EU would try to enforce the GDPR worldwide, it would mean the EU gets cut off from 99% of the internet. Then Europeans can only use giants like Google and Facebook. Because smaller players can not duplicate all of their infrastructure using tools based in the EU.

It won't happen. It would be as if the EU sanctions itself into stone age. Imagine the physical industry would be told that it can only use parts made in the EU from now on.

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