The Town Everyone Leaves
Haapsalu, Estonia, sits on the Baltic coast like a forgotten postcard. Its promenade is lined with 19th-century wooden villas. Its castle ruins attract summer tourists who snap photos and leave by evening. The population hovers around 9,500 — a number that has been shrinking, slowly, for two decades.
Most ambitious young Estonians leave Haapsalu at eighteen. They go to Tartu for university, then to Tallinn for work, and if they're particularly hungry, they fly to London, Berlin, or — the aspirational default — San Francisco. Estonia's tech scene, small as it is, concentrates fiercely in its capital.
Maarit Kask left at eighteen. She studied computer science at the University of Tartu, completed a short internship at a Tallinn-based fintech, and then, at twenty-four, she came home.
Not because she failed. She came back because her grandmother got sick, and because she noticed something her peers in Tallinn kept complaining about: rent, noise, the endless performance of being seen.
"I kept thinking," Kask told me over a video call from her kitchen, "why am I paying €900 a month to sit in a coworking space in Ülemiste when I could build the same thing here?"
That question, asked in 2019, became the founding premise of Kett — a supply-chain management platform for small manufacturers doing €500K to €5M in annual revenue. Today, Kett serves customers in fourteen countries, employs eight people, and generates approximately €1.2 million in annual recurring revenue.
Kask has never moved out of Haapsalu. She drives a twelve-year-old Škoda. Her office is a converted storage room behind her family's vacation cottage, heated by a wood stove that costs her roughly €400 per winter.
The First 18 Months: Quiet and Expensive
Kask started Kett with €18,000 of her own savings and a single paying pilot client — a metal fabrication shop in Pärnu, 60 kilometers south, that needed help tracking incoming raw materials across three suppliers. The pilot paid €300 per month. It barely covered her software hosting costs and the occasional drive to Pärnu for onboarding meetings.
For the first fourteen months, Kett had two customers. Two.
"The loneliness was real," Kask says, without melodrama. "In Tallinn, if you're building a SaaS product, you're surrounded by people who understand what you're doing. You can grab lunch and compare notes on churn rates. Here, I was the only person I knew who talked about API integrations. My neighbors thought I was still working from home at the fintech."
She coped by attending one conference per year — typically a SaaS event in Riga or Helsinki — and by participating in a Slack community for Estonian indie hackers. That was her network. Two events and a Slack channel.
But Haapsalu gave her something the big cities couldn't: a monthly burn rate of €2,200. Rent (she lived at home), food, hosting, basic tools. In Tallinn, a solo founder at the same stage was burning €4,500 to €5,000 per month. Kask could survive fourteen months of two customers without quitting. A founder in Tallinn, at that burn rate, would have needed to raise money or shut down by month seven.
This is the advantage nobody talks about in startup lessons from big cities: time. Staying small bought Kask time.
The Breakthrough Was Unsexy
Kett didn't go viral. There was no Product Hunt launch, no TechCrunch feature. The breakthrough came in month nineteen, when a mid-sized packaging manufacturer in Latvia discovered Kett through a single blog post Kask had written about inventory tracking for custom manufacturers. The blog post was written in English, targeting a narrow keyword — "ERP for small metal workshops" — that no venture-backed competitor bothered to rank for because the search volume was too small to matter to them.
That Latvian manufacturer signed a €1,200/month contract and referred Kask to two peers. Within six months, Kett had eleven customers across the Baltics and Finland. Kask's revenue crossed €10,000 MRR for the first time.
She hired her first employee — a local woman named Piret who had been doing bookkeeping for a fishing equipment company and wanted to learn SaaS operations. Piret still lives in Haapsalu. She still does bookkeeping on the side. Kett pays her €2,800 per month, which in Haapsalu is a very good salary.
"Talent here isn't scarce," Kask says. "What's scarce is good jobs that let you stay. I just gave them that."
The Near-Death Experience
In late 2022, a customer representing 30% of Kett's MRR — a Turkish packaging firm — went insolvent overnight. Kett lost €3,600 in monthly revenue in a single week. Simultaneously, two other customers downgraded to cheaper plans.
For three weeks, Kett's runway was under two months.
Kask considered raising a small angel round. She had a conversation with a Tallinn-based investor who offered €80,000 at a valuation that made her stomach turn — essentially, he was pricing Kett as a local Estonian company, not a global one. He kept saying, "You'd be worth more if you were in Tallinn."
She declined. Instead, she cut her own salary to €1,500 for four months, personally called every customer, and landed three new contracts within eight weeks through direct outreach — not marketing. Her combined experience as a former fintech developer and a small-town neighbor made her unusually effective at trust-building over the phone.
By March 2023, Kett was back to pre-crisis revenue. By December, it had crossed €60,000 MRR.
The Philosophy: Stay Small, Stay Global
Kett now has eight employees. Six live within 40 kilometers of Haapsalu. Two are in Finland and one in Romania, working remotely. Kask has never taken outside funding. She owns 100% of the company.
Her annual revenue target for 2025 is €1.5 million. She has no interest in becoming a €50 million company. "I don't want 80 employees," she says. "I want to keep this team. I want to keep driving to the forest on weekends. I want to know every customer by name."
This is not a modest ambition disguised as wisdom. It is a genuine, hard-won philosophy about what a company is for. Kett serves its customers well. It pays its employees well by local standards. It generates profit. It exists on its own terms.
The global entrepreneur story doesn't require a global address.
Lessons for Filipino Entrepreneurs
For Filipino founders eyeing the metropolis — or worse, eyeing Dubai, Singapore, or the Bay Area — Kask's story offers several grounded lessons:
1. Your burn rate is a strategy, not a limitation. A founder in Cebu or Davao with a monthly burn of ₱40,000 can survive eighteen months of slow traction. A founder in BGC burning ₱150,000 per month cannot. Staying small is not settling — it is buying optionality.
2. Local talent pools are underrated. The best bookkeeper, the most loyal operations person, the developer who wants to stay near family — they exist in every province. The startup ecosystem narrative tells you talent concentrates in cities. The reality is that talent disperses when you offer them a reason to stay.
3. Build for a market that doesn't care where you are. Kett's customers in Latvia and Finland never visited Haapsalu. They cared about the product, the response time, the reliability. As a Filipino entrepreneur, if you're building software or services for global clients, your location is a footnote. Your output is everything.
4. The loneliness is real, but manageable. Kask's network was one conference and a Slack channel. You don't need a coworking community of 200 founders. You need three people who understand your work. In the Philippines, that might be one WhatsApp group, one mentor, one peer. Quality over quantity.
5. Stay small as long as staying small serves the mission. Growth for growth's sake — chasing headcount, chasing valuation, chasing the optics of a bigger city — is a form of identity performance. The most powerful startup lesson from a global entrepreneur like Maarit Kask is this: you don't owe anyone your expansion. You owe your customers your excellence. Everything else is optional.