Hey expats. Recently, I shared 3 popular stories of how expat entrepreneurs bootstrapped their businesses: 🤯

• $25M+ pizza chain in Vietnam

• ~$15M online therapy service in UK

• ~$1M job board for developers in Japan 

Today in 10 minutes or less, you’ll learn:

• 📚️ 3 case studies of 7- and 8-figure expat entrepreneurs

• 💡 8 shared lessons on market, culture, product, and price

P.S. Like these entrepreneurship stories? Hit reply and tell me about an exciting expat business. 🙏 

💡 Lessons learned from 8-figure expat entrepreneurs

📚 Three case studies

🍕 Pizza 4P’s: Pizza brand in Vietnam with 26 restaurants, Ippudo brand, cheese production, and wholesales/retail sales to 300+ stores. 4P’s = “For Peace” ($25M+ / year)

💙 Unobravo: Online therapy service with >60k patients, >2.3k psychologists, and operates in Italy & Spain ($15M net ARR)

🧑‍💻 Japan Dev: Job board for developers in Japan with a pay-for-successful-hire model ($960k+ / year)

🌱 How they got started

🍕 Pizza 4P’s

• In 2005, Yosuke and his good friend, Takaaki Yoshikawa, guided by good ol' Youtube, spent 6 months building a pizza oven in Yosuke's backyard in Japan.

• They hosted pizza parties and fell in love with the power of pizza to bring together strangers and create friendships.

• Years later, in 2008, they met again in Vietnam while working as a venture capitalist and film director. They caught the entrepreneurial bug and the idea of 4P’s pizza was born.

💙 Unobravo

• Danila De Stefano founded Unobravo in 2016 after moving from Italy to the UK and struggling to find affordable mental health care.

• She realized many Italian expats faced the same problem, so she started offering remote psychology services to them.

• Her practice grew quickly, and she eventually hired a team of 9 psychologists.

🧑‍💻 Japan Dev

• Eric Turner, an American software developer, fell in love with Japan during a high school program. Eventually, he moved to Tokyo for a software career.

• While working in Japan's tech industry (which gave him culture shock initially), he started sharing progressive, globally-minded businesses on Reddit to help other expat developers break into Japan tech.

• Partnering up with his wife Manami, this project launched as Japan Dev in 2019.

🧩 How they solved key challenges

🍕 Pizza 4P’s