In January 2025, I had $2,400 in my bank account and a half-built SaaS product that nobody was using. By December, I was at $10K MRR, had paying customers in 14 countries, and had lived in founder houses in Lisbon, Bali, and Bangkok. This is the story of how the environment changed everything.

Before: The London Apartment

I'd been working on my product, a tool that helps SaaS companies manage their pricing experiments, for about eight months from my flat in London. The flat was fine. One bedroom in Hackney, decent internet, close to a few cafes I liked. But I was completely alone.

I'd wake up, open my laptop, work for a few hours, realize I hadn't spoken to anyone, go to a cafe, come back, try to work more, get distracted, and go to bed feeling like I'd wasted the day. I was making progress on the product, technically. But it was slow, joyless, and I had no idea if what I was building was any good because I had nobody to bounce ideas off.

My lease was up in January, and a friend mentioned he'd just spent two months in a founder house in Lisbon. "You'd love it," he said. "Everyone there is building something." I booked a flight that week.

Lisbon: The Wake-Up Call

The Lisbon house had 12 people. Six were working on startups, two were freelance developers, and the rest were remote employees at tech companies. For the first time in months, I was eating dinner with people who understood what I was doing.

The impact was immediate. In my first week, a guy named Marco looked at my landing page and told me, politely, that it was terrible. He was right. We spent an evening rewriting the copy together. Conversions doubled. That single conversation was worth more than six months of working alone.

I stayed in Lisbon for two months. During that time I launched my public beta, got my first three paying customers, and completely redesigned the onboarding flow based on feedback from other founders at the house. My MRR went from $0 to about $800.

Bali: The Acceleration

I arrived at Founder Stays in Canggu in April. The workspace was noticeably better than Lisbon: standing desks, external monitors, 500 Mbps fiber. But the real difference was the community filter. Every single person in the house was a founder or senior builder. The conversations were more specific, more useful, and more challenging.

Within the first week, another founder at the house named Sophie, who was running a B2B SaaS about twice my size, sat down with me and walked through my pricing page. She pointed out that I was massively undercharging. "You're selling to companies making millions in revenue," she said. "They don't care about $29/month. They care about whether it works." I raised my prices 3x. Churn didn't change. Revenue tripled.

The other thing that happened in Bali was the routine. I'd wake up at 6:30, surf for an hour, have breakfast, then work from 8:30 to 1pm with zero interruptions. Lunch, gym, then meetings and customer calls from 3-6pm (overlapping with European business hours). By 6pm I was done, and I'd join the group for dinner. It was the most productive schedule I've ever had.

I stayed four months. MRR went from $800 to about $6,500.

Bangkok: The Growth Phase

I moved to Bangkok in August, partly because a few founders I'd met in Bali were heading there and partly because I wanted to be in a timezone closer to my growing Australian customer base. The founder house in Bangkok was different from Bali: more urban, more intense, and the people were slightly further along in their journeys. Multiple residents were doing $20K+ MRR.

Being around people at that stage shifted my thinking from "can I make this work?" to "how do I scale this?" I hired my first contractor, started doing outbound sales (something I'd been afraid of), and built an integration with Stripe that opened up a new customer segment.

By December, I hit $10K MRR. Not life-changing money, but enough to cover my costs comfortably, save a bit, and keep building without panic.

What Actually Mattered

Looking back, three things made the difference, and none of them were about the location itself.

The people around me. Every major improvement to my product and business came from a conversation with someone at a founder house. Not from reading blog posts or watching YouTube videos. From a real person who looked at what I was doing and told me what they honestly thought.

The routine. Having a workspace I went to every day, a schedule I followed, and a social life that happened automatically (through shared meals and common spaces) freed up enormous mental energy. I didn't have to decide where to work, where to eat, or how to meet people. That energy went into the product.

The cost structure. Living in Bali and Bangkok for $1,500-2,000/month all-in meant my runway stretched much further than it would have in London. That lower burn rate gave me the psychological safety to take risks, like raising prices or turning down a contract gig that would have distracted me from the product.

Would I have hit $10K MRR if I'd stayed in my London flat? Maybe. Eventually. But it would have taken a lot longer, and it would have been a lot lonelier. The founder house path wasn't just faster. It was better in every way that matters.