Hi, my name is Rob and goodness knows how you stumbled upon this blog. It is a mishmash of old writings from a road trip 18 years ago, my life in America nearly a decade ago and a few other travel tails. I will now be using it to describe my experience as a British immigrant in Sweden, sharing some hints and tips for navigating life here.
For the last 14 years, I have been teaching science at schools in London, Manchester and San Francisco. This summer I quit all that and jumped feet first into a new career as a tech bro.
Frequently Asked Questions
What do you do for work?
I launched an app called Mega Seating Plan in 2015, and it became unexpectedly popular. That overnight success means that after a decade of working countless hours around a busy teaching career, I am now able to run it full time. This, I think, makes me an entrepreneur. Every few years, I post to a separate blog about that story.
So that’s what I do for work. I run an online software-as-a-service (SaaS) business. I do practically everything: the strategy, the coding, the design, the sales, the marketing, the bookkeeping, the customer support. I am a one-man band.
Why Sweden?
If I had a krona for every time I’d been asked that question… Here’s the long version.
I never really considered living abroad until quite suddenly, after a lovely holiday in Japan in 2015, I got an itch. Scratching that itch took me to a jobs fair in London for international schools. I went from hotel room to hotel room, interviewing with head teachers from across the world, before eventually taking a job at the International School of San Francisco.
I moved there a month or so after the Brexit referendum of 2016, and almost immediately infected America with my political bad fortune when Trump got elected a few months later. But despite my host country’s tendency to elect Wotsit-skinned fascist man-babies, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience of living overseas.
After a couple of years, I returned to the UK to teach in Manchester. I hadn’t intended to remain in the UK forever, but the arrival of Covid in 2020 rather complicated any move abroad.
By the time I finally started looking at international school jobs again, I had reduced my teaching hours to three days a week. This made it harder to find a teaching role that could sponsor a visa which, thanks to Brexit, would be necessary even in the EU.
So I needed a plan B. What if I could build my business to the point that it could become my full-time job? Would that allow me to live abroad again?
The answer to this was not straightforward (thanks again must go to Brexit). Each country has its own requirements for issuing visas/residence permits for self-employment.
This is the bit where, eight paragraphs into my answer, I finally mention Sweden. Mega Seating Plan is popular in much of the anglophone world: the UK, USA, Australia etc. But it is also widely-used by teachers across Sweden.
Sweden has a ‘residence permit for self-employed people’, allowing foreigners to bring their existing business to Sweden. And it turned out that I met the requirements because my business has both customers and suppliers in Sweden.
So in December last year I submitted an application. According to the Swedish government website, the waiting time for a decision could be a couple of years.
A few weeks later, while sitting at the back of my classroom observing a student teacher, I received an email granting me a residence permit with immediate effect. I saw out the last six months of the academic year and arrived in Sweden on 1st August.
That was the long, quite technical, answer. But I didn’t just move to Sweden because I could. I chose Sweden because it’s objectively a pretty great place to live.
It ranks fourth in the World Happiness Index (behind only Finland, Denmark and Iceland), has great public services and beautiful natural surroundings. The Swedes have embraced a social democratic model of government that gives them capitalism with compassion, innovation with inclusion, and freedom with fairness.
On paper, it’s a wonderful place to live, and I intend to find out if that is true.