I've had a company incorporated in Hong Kong (HK) while living in Thailand, and a company incorporated in the British virgin isles (BVI) while living in Russia.

I've had a company incorporated in Hong Kong (HK) while living in Thailand, and a company incorporated in the British virgin isles (BVI) while living in Russia. These were both very small software development shops around 5 employees. The cost of incorporation in both HK and BVI is around 2 to 4 thousand USD, if you pay a company to sort out all the paperwork, bank accounts etc. You also have to pay every year (roughly the same amount though a little less), to maintain the company. This again if you pay an agent company to take care of all the paperwork, which I'd highly recommend. As for internet, both in Thailand and Russia it was absolutely fine for most purposes. You do have the occasional outage, but it's seldom. We did however have a backup 3G mobile internet line we used in these cases. Whether or not you have to worry about handle physical mail, depends entirely on your business. We didn't have any use for it, but we were doing software so your mileage may vary. In most cases I'd think you'd be fine with a physical mail address in the US (or whereever your customers are), that can forward any mail to you. As for tax, I wouldn't really know US rules - I formally emigrated from my home country, thereby making me tax exempt (but also non eligible to receive any services). Whether or not you need to pay personal income tax in your new country of residence, depends on the individual tax laws of the country. If you live like most expats do (on some form of a tourist visa), you usually don't pay tax there either. But you really should consult a local lawyer for details on this, as you generally do not want to risk breaking any laws in a country like Thailand or Cambodia. As for corporate tax, this is zero percent if your company is incorporated in either HK or BVI. Heck, in BVI you don't even have to file annual accounting papers! If you are curious we used www.ocra.com to incorporate in BVI and www.willsonn.com for incorporation in HK. Both of those companies can get the job done, but neither of them are very good at customer service. If I had to do it again, I'd probably look for a different agent. Apart from that, there is really not much to it. Again depending on your situation, almost everything can be handled on telephone, email or fax (!). Main issues are as others have mentioned: You are far from family and friends. You may have to do lots of expensive business travel. It can be really hard to scale the business, unless you are able to work within a distributed team.