4 ms·

Does this mean you have a huge opportunity to be the Stripe (or Braintree/Recurly/Hulu etc) of Lithuania?

• guard-of-terra 15y ago
  That's the problem with tiny countries: - Global market players don't come because they don't think the effort would pay for itself. - The country is too tiny to make cloning business models feasible. In Europe, there are a lot of tiny countries: 3 baltic states, 3 transcaucasian states, moldavia, some former yugoslavian states. And then you have countries that are just small and not very rich, so they are always late to any party: most of western europe, greece perhaps. Even some core european countries might see this effect (for example, where does Amazon work?) And trying to bootstrap in ten mostly unrelated countries at once would lead to failure. And if you succeed, global players might come and eat your lunch. It's an interesting effect where a small country suffers a noticeable drop in quality of online life due to many services being unavailable.
  • rickmb 15y ago
    You're overstating the issue. There's only one thing that keeps most services from being available: the insane antiquated and utterly corrupt copyright laws. Without that, there would be no issue. Specific stuff like online payments very much depend on local context, and in many countries they barely even have the problem Stripe is trying to solve for the US market.
    • guard-of-terra 15y ago
      The copyright thing is real, and it does prevent access to those services. Ask anyone from a small country how it affects them. It's also payments, logistics sometimes. You can't open in a part of country and leave other part behind, but you can do that with a mosaic of countries.