We all love numbers. Numbers make the world go round. Apparently, someone smart once said “what can be measured can be improved”. This someone was Peter Drucker, the father of modern business management. He actually said “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”, but that leads to the same action: measuring and collecting numbers. And so we all worry about our figures, trying to surpass our best performance, trying to reach our benchmarks and KPIs, hoping to look at a chart and see a line that slopes upward as a result of our booming growth. Yes, growth is what everyone wants. Growth is not directly related to making more money but it’s always a sign that your business is reaching and impacting more people. This is what the modern economy demands: impacting people, gaining traction… …and so we measure. In today’s economy, companies spend a great deal of effort collecting numbers and statistics in a constant attempt to improve their business.



Google Analytics is perhaps the most popular suite for data collection available today. In its stunning simplicity, Google Analytics can collect data from your fridge with the same ease it collects data from your website. The possibilities are endless. There’s no limit to our freedom of collecting numbers, and spending resources, time, and money, to try to make sense of them. As a digital service, e-Residency generates a lot of data. All that information is systematically logged and stored. The system has been designed to require no human assistance and statistics are automatically generated. Those statistics monitor indicators related to e-residents facts, demographics, location and behaviour, such as: number of applicants;

number of e-residents;

speed of growth (e-residents per week);

demographics (sex, age);

nationality;

motivation to apply;

engagement with Estonian companies;

establishment of new companies (by e-residents);

areas of economic activity of the new established companies. All these indicators are very valuable to Estonia for evaluating the performance of their e-Residency program. As for other innovative and disruptive services, there’s no history we can rely upon to forecast the destiny of e-Residency. Obviously, this raises several concerns: …is it working?



…do people actually manage to use it? …is it growing? …is it a fad or is it something that will stick with us for a long time? …does it bring real value to Estonia? …are people actually using e-Residency to create new companies and business opportunities? These are all fascinating questions that could be answered looking at e-Residency statistics. This is exactly why the good people of e-Residency built a system that collects all those data. But they did much more… They made the data public. Yes, e-Residency statistics are publicly available and updated in real time! High-five to Estonia for sharing the results of their disruptive experiment with the world. A first glance at the weekly chart of new e-residents leaves no doubt: e-Residency works, it is used and it’s growing fast. The current growth rate is between 200 and 300 new e-residents per week and, thanks to the work of the many people who are promoting the service, the weekly growth-rate is now showing signs of acceleration. Even more, Estonia’s new e-residents are surpassing the country’s birth rate.