SavvyNomad

We Built A $30K/Month Tax Saving App

February 26th, 2025

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About
Business

Bohdan Drozdov

Founder, SavvyNomad

$30K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

SavvyNomad

savvynomad.io

from

started April 2023

$30,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Who are you and what business did you start?

Hello! I’m Bohdan Drozdov, co-founder of Savvy Nomad, a service that helps American expats and digital nomads optimize their tax residency and legally reduce their U.S. tax burden. Our primary customers are location-independent professionals, entrepreneurs, and remote workers who want to maximize their financial freedom while living abroad.

What makes Savvy Nomad unique is our deep understanding of both tax strategy and the nomadic lifestyle. Unlike traditional services that focus solely on mail forwarding, we provide a full domicile solution, ensuring that our customers establish a legitimate tax residency in the best U.S. states with no income tax—without unnecessary risks or complications.

Today, we bring in around $30K/month, and we continue to refine our offering to provide even more value to our customers.

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How do you come up with the idea for SavvyNomad?

The idea for Savvy Nomad started when my co-founder, Jameson, was traveling in Morocco and met a group of Californian surfers who had been living abroad for years but were struggling with the complexities of the U.S. tax system. Jameson, with his background in accounting and experience in tax-free Nevada, saw an opportunity to help expats and digital nomads legally reduce their tax burden.

While I didn’t come up with the original idea, my journey to Savvy Nomad was shaped by my experience founding Taxarity, a startup focused on making taxation transparent and client-friendly through digitalization. My vision was to build a global marketplace where people could compare and seamlessly move between tax regimes with automated paperwork.

Because of my previous experience, I immediately saw the clarity of its value proposition—a service that directly helps nomads establish a legal tax residency in no-income-tax states without unnecessary complexity.

Instead of overcomplicating things, I focused on scaling, refining the offer, and optimizing pricing to create a profitable, sustainable business.

Now, Savvy Nomad generates $30K/month, helping hundreds of expats legally optimize their taxes while embracing location independence.

Failing at Taxarity was one of the best lessons I could have had—because it led me to build something that truly works.

How did you build the initial version of SavvyNomad?

The first step was researching existing solutions, and quickly realized that while there were options for full-time RVers and retirees, there was nothing built specifically for digital nomads and expats. That was our green light—we saw a clear gap in the market.

SavvyNomad started with around $15,000 in initial costs, and honestly, $13,000 of that went straight into legal fees and research. Since we’re dealing with tax residency and compliance, we had to make sure everything was airtight.

From day one, the business model was subscription-based, and it’s still the same today. It just makes sense—tax residency isn’t a one-time thing, so offering an ongoing service was the best way to provide real value while keeping revenue predictable.

We bootstrapped everything using our savings, which gave us full control over decisions without outside pressure. For building the product, we used Bubble for the application and Framer.com for the website, which helped us move fast without needing a full development team.

It took us three months to launch the first version, not because of technical challenges, but because of the crazy amount of legal details we had to sort out. We started with South Dakota, since it was already popular for tax residency, and later expanded to Florida, which offered even more benefits for nomads.

Honestly, it was harder than we expected—not because of the tech, but because of all the little nuances about residency and domicile laws in different states. But looking back, all that work paid off.

How did you launch SavvyNomad and get initial traction?

At first, we tried a little bit of everything—Reddit mentions, Product Hunt, and other random marketing experiments. It helped us land our first customers, but we quickly realized that this scattershot approach wasn’t sustainable.

After getting some initial traction, we rebranded and rebuilt the website, transitioning from an MVP into a fully-fledged product and service. That’s when we figured out that random marketing hacks don’t scale—we needed a systematic approach to customer acquisition.

So I doubled down on content marketing—writing in-depth articles about state taxes, tax residency, tax credits, and expat tax strategies. Within a few months, organic traffic started kicking off, and that’s when we saw real momentum. Later, we scaled things further with Google Search Ads, which became another major acquisition channel.

Lessons: - At first, random marketing tactics work to get attention and maybe land a few early customers. - But long-term growth needs scalable, predictable channels. For us, that turned out to be SEO and paid search.

When I joined, Savvy Nomad already had a few paying customers, but we weren’t really growing yet. The real traction only started about three months later, when we finally made the service scalable and launched Florida as a tax residency option. That’s when things really started to take off.

Our first dollar from scalable growth came three months after launch—once we had the right infrastructure and marketing channels in place.

It took us about three months of refining the product and marketing strategy before we started bringing in customers consistently. Once we launched Florida, things really started to scale.

Now, our main growth drivers are organic content and Google Search Ads.

What was the growth strategy for SavvyNomad and how did you scale?

Our main growth channels have been SEO and Google Search Ads. These two bring in the majority of our customers, and over time, we’ve refined them to be highly efficient and scalable. We’ve also experimented with other strategies like influencer marketing, video content, and affiliate partnerships, but so far, these only make up a small percentage of new customers compared to search traffic.

One of our most successful strategies has been tapping into an unmet demand. Initially, our core focus was helping nomads establish domicile for tax savings, but we discovered that many Americans abroad needed a reliable U.S. residential address. We created a new landing page, ran targeted Google Search Ads, and it immediately took off. Now, it’s one of our main growth drivers, and we’re spending around $8,000 per month on Google Ads. This worked because we found a high-intent search market where no one else was running ads, allowing us to dominate the space with little competition.

Another major driver of growth has been content. I’ve personally written over 110 articles covering state residency, tax strategies, and U.S. expat taxation. I focused on deeply researching each topic and used LLMs to speed up the process while ensuring the content remained clear, practical, and easy to read. Most tax-related content is full of legal jargon, making it difficult for the average person to understand. Our articles stand out because they are written in a straightforward way, are well-structured with visuals to explain concepts, and go deep into specifics that people actually need.

The biggest lessons from growing the business have been the importance of building scalable acquisition channels early, listening to demand and adjusting accordingly, and understanding that high-quality content can drive long-term growth if done right. Initially, we didn’t plan to offer U.S. residential addresses, but when we saw the demand, we launched fast, and it became a major success. Writing detailed, well-researched content took time, but it has now become a consistent driver of traffic and leads.

Now, with SEO and paid search as our foundation, we’re continuing to scale and grow.

What were the biggest lessons learned from building SavvyNomad?

One of the biggest mistakes I made early on was trying too many different channels and strategies at once. At first, this approach helped us find what worked, but I quickly realized that spreading myself too thin wasn’t the best option for long-term growth. I was chasing the dopamine hit of trying something new instead of focusing on what was actually moving the business forward.

The key lesson was that you have to prioritize what works for the business, not what feels exciting at the moment.

A great decision we made early on was investing in content marketing. Our two main acquisition channels—organic search (SEO) and paid search (Google Ads)—complement each other well. I’m constantly transferring insights and experiments from one channel to the other, which helps us optimize both. We also experimented with partnerships, which helped us build some initial trust, but we found that partners were slow-moving and not scalable, so we decided to focus elsewhere.

External factors have definitely worked in our favor. There’s been a huge shift in how Americans think about living abroad. More people are working remotely, younger generations want to travel, and retirees are looking for better, more affordable places to live. This growing trend has helped create more demand for what we offer.

One of my most useful skills has been being a marketing generalist. Over the years, I’ve learned how to work across different channels, craft messaging, plan campaigns, and optimize growth strategies. Now, I’m applying all of that to my own business, and it’s paying off.

One of the biggest experiments that worked was raising our prices. We modeled out different pricing scenarios and realized we could scale faster by increasing prices rather than just trying to add more customers. It worked—our monthly revenue growth jumped from adding $1,000 MRR per month to $4,500 MRR per month. Many founders are scared to increase prices, but if the value is there, it can actually accelerate growth instead of slowing it down.

Another important lesson is understanding what makes us different from competitors. In our space, a lot of competitors are old-school businesses with outdated websites and slow customer service. We knew we could out-execute them by offering a better UX, a cleaner UI, and an extremely customer-first approach. That’s been a huge advantage and something we’ll keep doubling down on.

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