4 ms·
I ran a company in the Philippines for two years. It was a good experience -- good, not great. Pros: * Cheap -- You can make it as cheap as you want. You ca
by brown 14y ago
I ran a company in the Philippines for two years. It was a good experience -- good, not great.
Pros:
* Cheap -- You can make it as cheap as you want. You can get down to $100-$200 per month if you're aggressive. But understand that you won't have the western lifestyle that you're used to. If you want a nice western kitchen, bathroom, consistent electricity, consistent bandwidth, then you're going to pay more and more. I found a sweetspot of about $1k/month total expenses.
* Quality of living -- this is related to cost. You can have a full time maid, driver, etc. It's totally normal, totally acceptable, and improves mental health significantly.
* Tropical weather, access to many travel destinations
Cons:
* Far from family and friends
* Lots of business travel -- If you have customers in the U.S. or Europe, inevitably you're going to end up traveling there frequently. This bothers some people more than others. It really wore me down.
* Difficult hiring environment -- It can be really hard to find top tier talent. Either be patient, or be willing to pay above market rates.
* Weak legal system -- As you achieve success, you will unfortunately become target of occasional shady behavior. For example, an accountant who skims petty cash, or a server admin who locks you out of your own servers. In the U.S., those risks are mitigated by a good legal system (and background checks, credit agencies, reliable postal system, etc). In developing countries, you are largely on your own. That can lead to a feeling of helplessness. Toughen up. Hire lawyers.
Non-cons:
* Taxes -- Yes, international taxes are complicated; however, you can easily afford local legal services to handle everything.
* Foreign bank accounts -- Not as scary as FACTA sounds. Hire a good U.S. accountant to do your taxes.
We had a U.S. LLC and local entity in the Philippines. Doing business as a U.S. entity is 1000x easier (think about payments, collections, legal services, etc). Have a local entinty for all local staff and your office.
The Philippines, like many developing countries, has many special government programs to encourage entrepreneurship. For example, we were in a program that granted a 5-year tax holiday and special visas for "job creators".
- tferris 14y agoMaybe a dumb question but I wonder always how the Internet connection in such countries is in general and even if it's great: does the lag to the western world annoys one after a while??
- hsuresh 14y agoI live in India, I have a 2mbps connection at home and pay about $40/month. Not sure what lag you are referring to. I dont have any problems talking to people on skype wherever in the world they may be.
- tferris 14y ago"ping heroku.com" for example and tell us your ping time
- sidman 14y agoDepends what you are doing. I did quite a bit of work from indonesia, philippines and singapore. Singapore no problems , indonesia & philippines it depends on what you do. If your main data consumption is video then it can get annoying, specially if your looking at more shady sites to get your movies and even non shady ones can be slow, youtube is probably the best out of all of them (mind you this was about 3 years ago so things could have gotten much better now) For example assume an above average connection, you still cant take watching videos for granted as you do in say AU or US. If you are heavy on the streaming whilst you work then it can be annoying, so there is some wait for a video to load, not long but at times the video is not loading faster then it plays so you get pauses. However if youre just browsing or working from a terminal screen there really isnt to much issues, its fast enough. What i found though is the 3G connection was terrible, mainly because the population is so large (specially) in indonesia that at busy times the service providers just can't keep up and the slowdown in 3g data can be felt.
- JohnGolt 14y ago20 mbit/sec in the provincial city in Ukraine, a bit more in the capital. Also, around 20 mbit/sec in the Bratislava, Slovakia. Internet connection not an issue in those countries.
- piranha 14y agoConnection in Ukraine is much better than in Malaysia, for example. Lag is lower (Ukraine is in Europe, obviously), speed in higher in average, price is lower. Speaking from personal experience.
- reledi 14y agoHow do you deal with the difficult hiring environment? I'm living in Canada right now but considering starting a startup in the Caribbean (where I'm originally from) but I know from experience that the talent there is nowhere as good as it is here. I'd probably have to recruit from North America, similar to what the guys at Tropical MBA are doing.