Nomadcapitalist sells residency services. His info is good, but he has an angle and shouldn't be used as a single source of truth. I like Wroclaw (which gives you access to Ukrainian programmers also) and Lisbon myself. Since Portuguese is easier to learn, and I already have people there, it will probably be Lisbon.
Yeah, I'm aware he's a consultant of some kind but from what I can tell it shouldn't be too hard to navigate the process on your own. A lot of what he focuses on are capital gains/taxes which I don't really care about too much.
Thanks for those links, super helpful, didn't know so many countries offered startup-specific visas. In that google doc spreadsheet it's missing some important investor visas (the startup visa for Estonia looks cool but since the investor visa has such low capital requirements, without digging deeper, it still looks like a better deal). And do you know the name of the program you are referencing with Wroclaw? Does Poland have some special program where you can sponsor Ukrainians' work visas there?
Just curious, what about Lisbon is so attractive to you? I know Spanish and can read most basic Portuguese but still was mostly ruling out Portugal due to what I perceived as too-small tech and entrepreneurial communities. Spain and Portugal seem like great places to work on an MVP with a couple other cofounders but I had kind of ruled them out for a place to really launch.
There's a host more investor visas of various kinds and "if you feel like it" visas. If you're a US national, you can basically stay in most EU countries if you want to. Each one will be a little different, but ultimately you have to work pretty hard to get tossed out of the EU. Some of these visa regimes are informal, like "OK, you seem like a nice guy and you're not going to go on the dole here." This is the kind of info that you WON'T get from concierge residency guys like NomadDude -he's trying to steer people towards things which he actually provides.
Lisbon: I like the food, climate and architecture better than Poland, and I have more friends who live there. Pretty simple, really: people on the ground trumps any information you're going to get on the internets. The projects on my horizons are all fairly high skill (ph.d. in math), low head count projects, and it's a lot easier to convince high skill people to move to Lisbon than Wroclaw or Lviv. There's also a decent nomadconsultant scene which has interesting social aspects. If I needed head count for a Bay Area type startup, I'd probably go straight to Ukraine, as I got people with top connections there. It's a beautiful country, and lots of the talent wants to stay there.
There was a decent overview of entrepreneur passport options on here the other week. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wLPGB2BdRxHWbdOXXtKA...
This one was left off the list for some reason (I have a pal who uses this visa, though he's in Ukraine a lot of the time): http://www.czechstartups.org/en/start-up-visa/