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Writer's pictureBjarte Bakke Austrheim

Day 2: Starting a business is 100X easier than 10 years ago

Since 2023, I’ve been struggling with Long COVID. Thankfully, someone recommended Norway’s top Long COVID/ME/CFS clinician, Marianne Svanevik, to me and I’m doing a lot better thanks to her. 🙂❤️


A few days ago, Marianne and I launched an online and personalized Long COVID Recovery Program that uses Marianne’s method for how to recover from Long COVID. It’s the product I wish I had when I first got sick - it would have saved me at least a year of misery. Check it out.


Anyway.


Welcome to the second post in our “Building a company in Norway” series:


If you read the first post, you remember that on August 6th, 2024 we filed the online “paperwork” to register a company in Norway. It’s super easy to do (one exception) and takes <15 minutes, but now we have to wait for about ONE MONTH before our company is officially registered. 


In Singapore this takes ONE DAY. What the hell are we doing in Norway? Do we aim to suck?


Please, put any experienced entrepreneur in charge of fixing this and we’ll get the process down to an hour, kicking some Singaporean ass on the way. ;) It’s not that hard and it would significantly improve the “starting a company in Norway” experience.


Anyway, yesterday, on August 7th 2024, we did a lot of the basic stuff required to start a company. We focused on getting shit done and spent <15 minutes time researching which services to use (can be changed later). We:


  1. Bought a domain for our website (CovidRecovery.co) using Wix. Cost: $39/year, <5 min.

  2. Built and launched the first version of our sucky website without writing a single line of code or paying for a designer using Wix. Cost $165/year for Wix Standard, several hours to create the website.

  3. Launched a WhatsApp chat service to enable customers to easily ask questions on our website using Chaty. Cost: $0, <5 min.

  4. Set up business emails and a workspace using Wix/Google. Cost: $90/year, <5 min.


The customer experience was great and it was all incredibly easy, 100x faster and cheaper than when we did this for our last startup 10 years ago!


We haven’t been able to add a payment service on our site. I can’t wait to do that as that used to be a nightmare way back, but with Stripe that should be a walk in the park. But we can’t do it now as our company is still not registered in Norway (zzz) and we have no bank account (zzz).


The worst thing about the above experience:

Wix: We felt cheated when during the signup process for their standard program they promised one year of web hosting for free. But, later in the process when we chose a .co domain, we were told the offer didn’t apply for .co domains.


The best thing: 

Wix/Chaty: How fast, easy, and cheap it was to set up a website and add WhatsApp to it.


We’ll let you know once we have something else interesting to share!


Marianne & Bjarte

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