the quintessential digital nomad

Fabio Faccin appreciates the freedom and flexibility e-⁠Residency provides for his business, PerformancePPC

PerformancePPC Founder Fabio Faccin is the quintessential digital nomad. Born and raised in Italy, he now calls Malta home and was in Spain at the time of our interview. If travel restrictions weren’t in place, he might very well be somewhere else. “I always liked to travel and do so a lot, mainly in Europe,” he says.

This yearning for freedom and flexibility led Faccin to become an Estonian e-⁠resident this year.

“I was looking to find a solution for creating a company that would allow me to travel and to manage my activity 100 percent online,” he says. He heard about e-⁠Residency via social media. He had never been to Estonia before — and still hasn’t visited, though he intends to once travel restrictions are eased.

“I planned to go, but then the coronavirus pandemic happened,” says Faccin. “I chose Estonia because I wanted to create my company in a country where I could manage my company independently from where I live,” he says. “Currently, I live in Malta, but I don’t know where I will live in a year or two, so I created my company there because of these incentives they give.”

Faccin became a newly minted Estonian e-⁠resident in May after years of working as a freelancer.

Just 30 years old, he has nearly a decade’s worth of experience in running online advertising campaigns. After graduation in 2012, he kicked around from agency to agency, honing his skills along the way, before deciding to go solo in 2016. From then until the incorporation of PerformancePPC in Estonia this spring, he freelanced. “I realized it was costing me a lot to go work in an office every day,” Faccin says of the decision to go freelance, which ultimately led to becoming an e-⁠resident.

PerformancePPC has also been successful, starting with no clients, then scaling up to growth of roughly 140 percent year over year, with an increasingly diverse customer base.

PerformancePPC now has seven collaborators involved, spread from South America to Europe. Faccin also tapped his brother Luca to help run the firm, although Fabio remains its sole shareholder. “We are all freelance and have the flexibility and freedom to work from wherever we want,” he says. “The only thing that I consider is our clients’ results.”

The strength of PerformancePPC lies in its synergistic approach of combining campaigns across multiple channels. Rather than designing a campaign for one specific channel, like Facebook, PerformancePPC will help run campaigns across Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other channels that feed off each other. “We are all experts in advertising channels,” says Faccin. “Once we understand the goal of our client, we can create a strategy to reach that goal.”

The company also has a three-tiered approach to serving its client base, offering training courses, coaching, and full campaign management. Clients vary in size and the scope of their needs, but appreciate the firm’s scalable offering. “My solution is more flexible because you can talk directly with the people who will manage your campaign, your investments, and your budget,” Faccin says.

Looking ahead, Faccin’s e-⁠Residency status has made him more interested in doing business in Estonia. He noted that PerformancePPC is currently looking for an Estonian collaborator and is looking to expand there. The firm is also seeking a collaborator that knows the English-speaking markets well and can help the firm expand similarly, as two-thirds of its clients are Italian. “We want to grow our business abroad and continue increasing our income at a rate of between 100 and 130 percent per year,” he says.

In general, Faccin has nothing but praise for Estonia’s e-⁠Residency programme. He said that customer support has been efficient, and that he has also been in touch with other e-⁠residents.

These days, Faccin recommends e-⁠Residency to other companies that run their businesses completely online. “If you are looking to internationalize your business, this could be the fastest and easiest way to do it,” he says. He thinks that other countries might benefit from studying Estonia and creating similar programs. “I hope e-⁠Residency will be considered an example for other European countries that are still backward when it comes to these subjects,” Faccin says.