So what’s next for Luka and his business?
As for Luka’s advice for aspiring entrepreneurs interested in e-Residency, he suggests that you just:
E-resident Luka Breitig is the founder of The Happy Beavers, a multi-lingual translation and content creation company for clients spread across the world. Luka is currently based in Kyiv, Ukraine but in his own words is “a digital nomad who got stuck in one place during the pandemic”.
Luka became an e-resident in 2019 after reading about e-Residency in several blogs and realising it could be a great solution for his online business. He was particularly attracted to the low bureaucracy and fully digital features of the program:
“E-Residency has enabled me to run a business completely online, without any unnecessary paperwork, notary visits or hassles you experience in other countries.”
Luka established The Happy Beavers in 2018. Through his Estonian company, he coordinates multilingual web content projects utilising a team of expert content writers and translators working remotely around the world.
The Happy Beavers offers to clients all-in-one content solutions in multiple languages tailored to their needs and resources. Using a combination of technology-driven “Beaver” solutions for translation and quality assurance along with the crafty human touches of talented wordsmiths and creative storytellers, Luka’s team customises the content needs of any client, from translating websites to editing and proofreading technical pieces, and even writing engaging articles in multiple languages.
The Happy Beavers regularly manage large content projects involving hundreds of texts and execute translations into dozens of languages, demonstrating the scale, complexity, and potential power of their work. They also advise on content and linguistic strategies to grow audience engagement and relevance in new markets.
Luka studied psychology and management with a focus on entrepreneurship. Since his study days, he was actively looking for opportunities to start his own business from scratch by coming up with all sorts of interesting ideas to turn into a business reality. While he has had ups and downs when trying to get some of these more proactive experiments off the ground, in the end it was a happy accident that he set up The Happy Beavers.
While working in a company as an employee in an unrelated field, a client learned in a meeting of Luka’s experience editing German texts and asked for help with finalising a book for publication. Luka agreed and after a successful collaboration, started doing more and more of this type of work for the client in his spare time. Eventually, Luka had so much work he saw an opportunity to turn his side hustle into something greater.
He left his job and The Happy Beavers was born. Incidentally, Luka’s original client is still to this day one of the biggest and happiest of Beaver clients. It’s a great story about how a chance meeting can be all it takes for a business to come to life.
Fast forward to 2020, and The Happy Beavers has seen business continue as usual despite the economic impacts of COVID-19. This is largely due to the fact that its core business was already coordinated and implemented remotely — Luka’s team are located in different places across the world, from Argentina to Japan. Luka was aware of the challenges facing other companies though and so was very quick to offer free consultation services to businesses wanting to internationalise their businesses and gain access to a wider range of clients in diverse markets by utilising translation and localisation strategies.
“COVID-19 has taught us a crucial lesson: to internationalise our businesses and get access to bigger markets. As a truly digital company, we connect with other digital companies around the world and help them get through this by executing their investment into content marketing.”
The Happy Beavers are investing into new languages, especially in the Asian markets, and also have plans to launch a dashboard to help clients run their content projects more efficiently. Luka is also thinking about returning to his digital nomad ways and travelling to Georgia once it’s safe enough to do so.
“Do it, it is almost always the best way to go. While it might seem to be a no-brainer to open a company in your country of residence, it is actually worth comparing who is making the best offer, and choosing the country which gives you the best business environment.”
