I can build enterprise software but I can't charge for it

Most of commenters in this thread are overcomplicating things and have no experience with gray area industries. What you need is Turkey, the UAE and Dubai. The payment stack however can be Chinese/middle eastern/eastern European. This is a fairly standard play for people of your background, from there you can bootstrap and then ultimately leverage yourself into a new citizenship (most commonly Canadian and Australian, or other places with easier citizenship by investment routes).

You are asking technologists in an English speaking forum targeting the American centric world. You should be enquiring with friends in the nearby Islamic countries. None of the problems you have encountered are new or have no solutions for. As a suggestion, look up the payment providers used by Pornhub (they are blacklisted by Visa and Mastercard) and that is a good starting point for you. Also look at where a lot of crypto platforms incorporate. There is a whole world outside of the Delaware Corp + Stripe Atlas game, but you certainly won't learn that from silicon valley forums.

I strongly suggest you don't let desperation drive you into a poor deal or enter yourself into a disadvantageous partnership. Take some time off to clear your head, and talk to people. Don't let the whole "product led growth" US centric sales strategy cloud your business decisions. In the rest of the world, B2B is not limited to MasterCard/Visa and most of the notion/stripe style credit card driven SaaS don't necessarily exist in the same way. For your type of product, you should be charging more too.

Also most importantly, make sure your bank account is in the middle east and avoid dealing with USD under any circumstance. If you have a foreign bank account in a less friendly jurisdiction, an overzealous compliance department can easily shut down your entire business.

> Partner in US/UK registers their own company - Opens Stripe under their company name - Hires me as a remote contractor (like any distributed team) - I hold equity as a foreign shareholder (which I thought was legal for non-US persons)

This structure clearly violates sanctions, yes.

The person opening the Stripe account in this case would be breaking the law and would be taking on the legal consequences of violating those sanctions.

Having another person act as a proxy for a business in a sanctioned country is unquestionably illegal, regardless of how you structure it. Equity agreements, remote contractor, handshake agreements, crypto payments, doesn't matter. Any arrangement like this is designed to avoid sanctions and violating sanctions is a big deal.

A better analogy would be the "Trade Offer" meme where someone offers a share of the profits, but your offer is that you are willing to violate serious international sanctions.

I feel for this guy, I really do.

I see comments like "is this a request to bypass sanctions" OR "he's iranian"

Let's remind ourselves of the following:

- First understand that he didn't choose to be born and raised in Iran.

- Second people grow up have families become attached to where they're born it's not easy to just 'pick up and leave' moving to a new country is expensive and extremely difficult especially from countries like Iran.

- Third he's building something he believes in which is probably better than most people who live in privileged countries who sit around and do nothing.

To me this reads like a plea for help.

He's built something and showing it to the world, if someone likes it and wants to fund him / get him out of Iran, so he can pursue his dreams AND have the people who help him benefit along with him. I'm sure he'll be all for that.

You're absolutely right, and I apologize for the confusion.

The demo is a single-session system (designed for hotel lobby kiosks where one person uses it at a time). If someone else is talking to the avatar when you visit, you won't see a QR code.

Here's a direct link you can try: https://ps.neoclerks.com:8451/player.html?ss=7591aecb-72d2-4...

If that's busy too, I'm happy to schedule a 15-min private demo. Email: EchenDeligani@gmail.com

This single-user limitation is product design (kiosk model) not technical - production handles 10-50 concurrent users per GPU. I should have explained this upfront and provided multiple demo instances for HN traffic.

My mistake - learning as I go here.