
Ask HN: Starting a business without a bank account - Yenrabbit
What would you do if you wanted to start a SaaS project, but:
- No proof of address, and possibly lack of ID documents
- No bank account, or untrustworthy local banks
- Stripe and PayPal have blacklisted your country.<p>I&#x27;m curious if there are good solutions to this. I&#x27;ve heard of Stripe Atlas, but it&#x27;s a little pricey as an upfront fee, and I&#x27;m not sure it solves everything one would need.<p>Would you lean on a friend somewhere first world to run things for you? Start accepting payment through something like fastspring and worry about payout options later? Incorporate somewhere weird?<p>I&#x27;m hoping to find a reasonable path that I can recommend to entrepreneurs (and potentially try myself, if I can find time for a side project).
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cpach
AFAIK Estonia has a program in order to facilitate starting a business there.
You might want to look into that.

Best of luck!

[https://e-resident.gov.ee/start-a-company/](https://e-resident.gov.ee/start-
a-company/)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Residency_of_Estonia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Residency_of_Estonia)

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rboyd
I don’t believe you could do this in the US. You could likely get by without a
bank account but not with your other restrictions.

You could probably start an affiliate site and use a check cashing service,
but even they would require docs.

Crypto payments maybe?

Why all the constraints?

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Yenrabbit
I live somewhere (Zimbabwe) where a lot of that stuff we take for granted is
very much not the default. Most folks have mobile money, and maybe a national
ID, but that's about it. Currency changes have meant 'USD' accounts have
changed to local currency overnight a few times, and the banking regulations
change continually, so they're not the most attractive option. For someone
here with an idea and some technical skills, I'd love for there to be a way to
start something without all the obstacles that are present simply because
they're in Zimbabwe. I should probably have kept the constraints list shorter,
but I am curious what options are out there. Crypto is starting to get adopted
here, so maybe that is a potential route. It still needs a way to go from
*coin to cash, but if bet most places have some system available.

~~~
auganov
So is producing a Zimbabwe ID/passport and address an option or not? Zimbabwe
nationals should be able to incorporate in America (and probably many other
places) and get everything setup this way. But besides Stripe Atlas, most
banks will generally require you to show up in person to open an account.

Searched for payment processing options in Zimbabwe and it looks like
2Checkout accepts businesses from there. It's a pretty solid processor,
supports many local payment options, which will help a lot if targeting
Africa.

