Thanks! It feels that you are speaking from your own experience. Indeed, it's hard. But not everyone understands this.
Do you think you would have been able to build the same business in say London?
Why wouldn't it be?
We have good technical people here in Belarus. But we have other problems. It’s almost impossible to find good Sales or Marketing talents here. I think it's due to the fact that we still have fewer product companies and more outsourcing. And of course English language. It's not native for us. While these positions imply impeccable knowledge.
Therefore, perhaps in London we could build sales/marketing team from day one and could sell better. But with the engineers it would be pretty much the same. Or even worse. I can imagine that we would probably hire people remotely, to save money, and this approach has some drawbacks.