HACKER Q&A
📣 Yenrabbit

Starting a business without a bank account


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.

I'm curious if there are good solutions to this. I've heard of Stripe Atlas, but it's a little pricey as an upfront fee, and I'm not sure it solves everything one would need.

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?

I'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).

  👤 cpach Accepted Answer ✓
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://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Residency_of_Estonia

👤 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?