Relocating our startup from Seattle to Morocco | Hacker News Reader

Relocating our startup from Seattle to Morocco

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53 pointsjonnymiller26 comments

Those of us who can work remotely are incredibly lucky. I spent last winter motorcycling and working in Mexico.

The photo of the Macbook by the ocean brought back memories. I had a nice little house on the beach for $500/mo. Unfortunately computer equipment won't last long in the salty air. My keyboard gave out after about a month.

The salt air is the biggest downside that no one ever mentions for beach condos.

We replace most electronics (including A/C units, microwaves, etc) every 18 months.

Absolutely. I lived on Oahu for six years and blew through all kinds of hardware.

Would love to hear more about this. Where did you go?

Same. Please share!

does the lower cost of living offset the cost of replacing electronics more often?

I'm a solo-founder, but I made the move to the mountains of Puerto Rico for similar reasons. Next year I'll move with my wife and kids to the beach.

By moving, we're able to survive on passive income from a few web properties so I can do nothing but think about building new websites and services.

For a team, I highly recommend it. You can stretch that runway really far and decrease your burn rate by moving lots of different places.

How do you find Puerto Rico? I spent two years in Chile, and it was really nice, love the people, the visas are good, but there's a lot of bureaucracy and its hard to import stuff.

There is a lot of bureaucracy here as well, but people here are nice and patient. Knowing Spanish is a big plus as it's the official language.

Navigation is tricky as the addressing scheme relies on naming the road and then how many kilometers the house is from the roads starting point. Google Maps is practically ineffective here.

Some things are far cheaper here and some things are far more expensive. Used vehicles are about equal as they would be on the mainland, but vehicle maintenance work is much cheaper. Rental prices outside of San Juan are very good. I'm living in the mountains around Adjuntas, in the interior, and paying $300 a month for a 1100 sqft 3 bedroom, 1 bath house. Since I'm at a higher altitude in the interior, the temperature hasn't gotten above 80 degrees yet (or dropped below 65) so we don't need to spend money on AC or heating.

Food and goods in stores is more expensive because of an ancient merchant marine law that requires goods shipped from US ports to US ports travel on US flagged ships constructed in the US. This means that the few ships that can make the journey legally get to charge what they want and that increases the costs of all goods delivered.

The way around it is ordering things online and having them shipped via USPS which treats Puerto Rico as domestic. Unfortunately, FedEx and UPS treat Puerto Rico as a foreign location and charge more. It's difficult to buy things on eBay because of that incongruity.

We're likely to remain here until next August and then we'll decide if we want to stay another year in the mountains, try living on the beach, or go back to the mainland. We left from Austin but we think we'll try either Chattanooga TN (for the 10gb connections) or some small town in Colorado (the kids demand snow) next.

All in all, I recommend a hacker retreat to Puerto Rico if you want to have some seclusion to get work done. It's easy to do on a budget and it's a bit easier for a (mainlander) American to pass here than it is in Central or South America.

I'm curious, did you move for Act 20/22? Based on your model, I assume so. I'll be making the move in December.

If anything I build over the next year gets any traction, then I was planning to take advantage of Act 20/22. The idea of having a corporation based in the US, but not in a state, is attractive because of Puerto Rico's big push for startups to relocate to the island. 10 years of pretty much no corporate taxes is very appealing.

Plus, the personal benefit of not having to pay any Federal Income Taxes, nor taxes on capital gains... It's really a great opportunity.

I'm interested in similar options for startups. Where was the company registered, and what would be the taxes, etc?

I would ideally want to start a company in Silicon Valley or any other tech centres of the U.S., but I guess such an option would require shelling out a great deal for taxes, offices, living expenses, salaries, etc.

Being Indian, Bangalore isn't an option either given it's rise in CoL.

OT, but any idea what the internet speed/power uptime situation is like in India these days?

Thinking of traveling around (Varanasi, Goa, southeast of Bangalore) but from what I gather you're doing well with 2MBs download and most days without power outages in a given month if outside the major cities.

I've done it before with spotty access/power but can get stressful scrambling for connectivity.

Metropolitan city centres have pretty good power/connectivity (4G/LTE, Fibre 100+ Mbit connections at ~$50USD). If you can get a cheap office space (with power backup of-course), you'd be golden.

Suburbs and other tier-2 cities are a bit of a gamble. A few states seem to be developing and positioning a few cities to be favourable for investment.

LTE and Fibre networks are mushrooming every other day, but I'm not sure about Varansi and Goa. Bangalore has pretty decent connectivity.

Thanks, helpful. I may delay my trip until the spring if that's the case (when can take time away from work).

I'd like to check out some areas outside of the big cities. Obviously India is an enormous country, will just be dipping the toes.

Weren't you guys in Startup Chile? I swear you've been getting play out of the "we relocated to Morocco" story for years-- not a criticism, good on ya!

I spent 10 months traveling and contracting in hostels, and struggled through some pretty shoddy and slow internet connections; However, Taghazout was the one place I couldn't find a consistent internet connection. I only lasted about 2 weeks trying each cafe and even some of the more expensive hotels, but the bigger problem was the power dropping out every 2 hours or so. I tried to get myself to be able to with develop offline, but unfortunately the product ending up getting more and more tied to SaaS products and I wasn't able to stay in Taghazout for longer.

I was curios to see where they found to setup and it turns out they are actually in the adjacent town. I can think of a couple other good reasons to setup somewhere else, but I imagine reliability is part of the reason they are located in the next town over.

Can anyone tell me, what sort of visa do you need (or is ideal) to relocate to Morocco (considering that I'll be working there and get paid)?

The big question is how they are going to grow, or is it small enough to only ever need 3 people (err...)

A company needs to grow and while this will work for the short term, to attract talent you need to have a talent pool.

Remote work, expat/nomadic workers and oh right 30 some odd million Moroccans. Surely they can find somebody to hire.

Which is why so many startups are located in the SF Bay area. Rent is absurdly expensive and hard to find (both office space and residential space) thus salaries and operating expenses are high -- good tech people can pretty much name their price.

Yet, despite this, at the end of the day, it's still the best place for many tech startups - they have a nearby talent pool (even though it can be challenging to entice people to make the leap), plus there are plenty of investors nearby.

But if you're trying to bootstrap a startup with your own funds and a few friends, I can see why moving to a place with a very low cost of living would be beneficial.

The reasoning about investors is circular. In order to be nearby investors, these startups need lots of money, which means they need investors, so that they can be nearby them. These investors then end up owning most of the shares in these startups. That is good, because these startups are nearby anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinque_Terre ?

Italy is not particularly cheap, unfortunately. Beautiful place, though!

Working remote from somewhere less crazy than SF might have worked too, but I guess packing up and leaving the country is an extreme version of that.

The article said their visas were expiring.

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