
Ask HN: What's the best way to start a SaaS company for an EU citizen? - fabiospampinato
I&#x27;m an Italian citizen and I&#x27;m searching for the best way to start a SaaS company. I&#x27;m interested in the following features:<p>1. Minimal bureaucracy burden: I&#x27;d rather spend my time on improving the product than navigate a mountain of bureaucracy. Also the more that can be done online the better.<p>2. Tax efficiency: everything else being equal I&#x27;d prefer to pay less taxes, but achieving a 0% taxation via some shady practices is not of interest to me.<p>3. Future-proof structure: I&#x27;d like to structure the company in a way that&#x27;s appropriate for when the startup grows beyond being just a one-person endeavor, basically I want to be able to hire somebody and issue shares to a partner or an investor in a relatively hassle-free manner.<p>I can consider relocating.<p>What&#x27;s the best way to do this?<p>How did you open your SaaS company, and are you happy with your choice?
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fabiospampinato
To give some more context I've evaluated/I'm evaluating the following options:

\- Italy: there are too many regulations and almost nothing can be done online
practically. And the startup ecosystem is crap, ~60m people and 0 unicorns,
the startup incubator in my city claims a 98% success rate or something like
that. This is obviously not a good environment for starting a company.

\- Estonia: I'm an e-Resident already but starting a company in Estonia as a
foreigner requires going through a service provider, the most popular one
seems to be leapin.eu and they don't support multi-shareholder companies, nor
having employees outside of Estonia. Maybe there's a more appropriate service
provider though. Plus Stripe is not available yet in the country, but I've
heard the situation will change in 2019.

\- US: it seems one needs somewhere between $500k to $1M to "buy" a green
card, so relocating there could be challenging. And opening a company in a
country to which I wouldn't be able to relocate to sounds like a dumb idea.
There's Stripe Atlas which could be interesting though.

\- UK: the startup ecosystem seems good, I've heard good things about the
governmental websites, but I'd like to wait for the dust about brexit to
settle before seriously considering this option.

