> It's seems wild how much simpler is it for Americans to try out a business idea when you read comments like this - just start selling, and pay your income tax (unless I'm getting the wrong impression).
This is likely by design and is both a prerequisite and consequence of America's lax attitude towards businesses. It is likely one of the pivotal reasons why America has many more businesspeople (even just counting Silicon Valley companies) than Europe.
FWIW almost all entrepreneurial efforts I’ve started were while living in east Asia.
I did start a house painting business in America when I was 19, though. Due to liability concerns and the fact that I franchised through a chain, I did have to form a company for that. It cost about $150 in fees and took a week.
It was a bit of a pain but ultimately not that hard compared to getting a loan, buying a truck, buying ladders, getting volume deals on paint, marketing and selling to customers, etc.
Online businesses are definitely quicker and simpler to start, but I’ve never felt that big of a difference in terms of jurisdiction-induced hassle. Maybe Europe is an exceptionally difficult place, but I can’t speak to that. I’ve never done business from there.
Another thing to keep in mind is than many, many non-US residents open US LLCs for online businesses. Most my friends in Taiwan starting international-facing tech-related businesses start under their own names and then either transition to US or Singapore-based entities. Mostly this is so they can use Stripe (which isn’t available to TW-based companies).
Unrelated but since you're big into Elixir, any thoughts on Gleam? Personally I like it because I like the concepts of Elixir but I can't do dynamic typing anymore after being burned too many times by it. And I'd much rather have a full statically typed language than something bolted on later like type hints in Ruby or Python.
I’d embrace the language for what it is and try to discover why it is so many people who generally prefer typed languages still use Erlang/Elixir. After getting to that point, maybe try Gleam if you still feel the need.
This is likely by design and is both a prerequisite and consequence of America's lax attitude towards businesses. It is likely one of the pivotal reasons why America has many more businesspeople (even just counting Silicon Valley companies) than Europe.