Forty-two million views and over 48 thousand followers on social media. A new venture – the Skanaus discount card – already counts 50 partner restaurants in over 100 locations, a partnership with Vilnius University and more than 700 members just a few months since launching. And it was all built in Lithuania – by a foreigner.
Earlier in October, LRT.lt reported on Lithuania’s ongoing challenge to retain international talent. Data from the Vilnius relocation and integration centre shows that only one in twenty foreign graduates of Lithuanian universities stays in the country to work.
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Lithuania-based British entrepreneur Corey Payne responded to the report, saying that despite the challenges, he hopes to show other foreigners that Lithuania offers plenty of opportunities for those who remain consistent, work hard, and tune out the negativity.
Corey, who has now lived in Lithuania for over a year, admits he was hesitant about moving to the country. Although he wanted to support his partner’s wish to raise their son closer to her family, he worried about maintaining the creative agency he had worked so hard to build in the UK.
“My God, I really didn’t want to move to Lithuania because I’d never even heard of it,” he recalls. “I was expecting to see apartment blocks that looked like Chernobyl everywhere. And I had so many arguments. I was like, ‘My business is going to fail. This isn't going to work.’ But then I came here. And I loved it. Literally. Everything is incredible! It's clean, it's peaceful, and I'd say in some aspects, it's even more advanced than the UK.”
Among Lithuania’s best qualities, Corey, who spends most of his day on a laptop, highlights its exceptionally strong Wi-Fi (“ten times better than in the UK”) and its sense of safety.
“Ride-rental platforms could never exist in England. They'd get stolen. My first ever boss was here last week, and I showed him one of those cars, and he was like, ‘What? They just leave the keys inside the car? That's insane!’ He thought it was such a cool concept.”
Ground rules for opportunities
To make it in a country he had never visited before, and without speaking the language, Corey says he set himself a few ground rules. The first was to move to one of the larger cities, “because that’s where the opportunities are”. He eventually settled in Kaunas. But he credits his real success to his second rule: posting content every single day.
“I heard this quote – If you make a video every day, you'll find opportunities – and I just ran with it,” he says. “In my first month, I set a goal of reaching 100,000 views so I could join TikTok’s Creator Fund, which allowed me to make some sort of income from my videos. And in the first month, I got 1 million views, which was crazy for me.”
Although Corey admits he no longer manages to post daily, he continues to share videos three to four times a week – documenting his discoveries around Lithuania, its culture, and its food. Lately, he has also begun filming himself practising the Lithuanian language.
“I bought a pair of glasses that record your point of view, so I try to use them in real-life situations to practise speaking,” he says. “These videos do really well, because people here love seeing you trying to speak their language, but it’s very hard. Especially the pronunciation of words – it's very, very hard. (...) But I do understand my son is going to eventually probably speak more Lithuanian than English.”
Beyond wanting to share his son’s language, Corey says he studies Lithuanian every day to prepare for the mandatory language test required for his third temporary residence permit. When asked if he was nervous about the test, he didn’t hesitate.
“No, because I’ll pass it.”
Love for the creative space
Over the past six months, Corey says his videos have averaged around four million views per month across Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
“If younger me could see me now, he'd be so proud,” he smiles. “The views that I get are incredible.”
This is not Corey’s first venture into the online world. He has been at it since he was about 13.
“I used to run a YouTube channel, making Call of Duty videos,” he recalls. “I had to learn how to market myself. And I did, by watching tutorials. That’s when I found my love for the creative space.”
His passion eventually led him to become a designer and website developer. Looking for more opportunities, he left his native Wellingborough – a small town an hour’s drive from London – and moved to Colwyn Bay in North Wales. There, he met a videographer, and just a week later, the two strangers launched a creative agency together.
“We decided to move into a flat together without knowing each other and just go all in,” he recalls.
The business – and the partnership – eventually relocated to Liverpool, survived the Covid pandemic and even adapted to Corey’s move to Lithuania. Eight and a half years after moving in with a stranger and a year into his life in Lithuania, Corey continues to run the agency remotely, occasionally returning to the UK for major clients.
He has also started developing a client base in Lithuania.
“I'd say the clients in Lithuania are a lot more picky, more perfectionist,” said Corey, comparing them to his UK clients. He adds that the companies he works with in Lithuania tend to be larger and therefore more demanding.
“But as far as acquiring the clients goes,” Corey continues, “it's easier here, because people actually answer emails. If I emailed 30 businesses in Lithuania today, I'd get at least one or two responses. In England, I'd get nothing, because people are conditioned to spam emails.”
A new venture in Lithuania
Income from his creative agency is what made it possible for Corey to start a life in Lithuania – and, eventually, a new venture: the discount card Skanaus, a name that encourages Lithuanians to enjoy their meal.
“As I'm integrating myself in this new community, I noticed that everyone's got a discount card for everything,” Corey recalls. “In the UK, there is something called the Tastecard, which offers discounts for basically every single big-chain restaurant. I thought, ‘Why is there not a singular digital discount card for restaurants in Lithuania?’ So, I decided to make it happen. Only I wanted to focus mainly on family-run, independent businesses.”
“I understood this was going to be a humongous challenge for me, a foreigner, to launch something like this and gain trust,” he continues. “All I had behind me was the audience that I had built up over a year. So, I did a video announcing a competition for schools to design the first-ever [restaurant-exclusive] discount card in Lithuania.”
Corey says he wanted to involve the community from the start. Five schools participated, with more than 125 entries submitted, and Radvilė from Šiauliai emerged victorious.
Gaining Lithuania's trust
But this was just the beginning of Corey’s battle to gain Lithuania’s trust. The entrepreneur says that to convince businesses to join his discount card, he had to visit every single restaurant in person, sometimes attending up to eight meetings in one day. That also means he had dined at all 50 restaurants currently listed on the card.
While speaking English hasn’t been an issue with most clients, Corey says it can be tricky when dealing with banks, car repair shops, or supermarkets. Lithuania’s Migration Department, in particular, was challenging to communicate with.
“You call them up on the phone, one person will say one thing. You get there in person, they'll say, ‘No, that person was wrong,’ and you keep getting passed around. And it's all wrong. And it isn't just because I'm an English speaker – these issues continue even when a Lithuanian speaker handles the communication,” he explains.
Still, Corey insists that these hurdles, along with the notoriously cold Lithuanian customer service, only take getting used to.
“The only dislike I have about Lithuania is the negativity from the older generation,” he shares. “When you try to do something different here, start a new idea, older people try to shut it down.”
“At first it was hard,” he admits. “I got comments telling me to go back home – proper racist comments. I just learned to move past it, to be honest.”
On one occasion, a user called him a coloniser. “I don’t really know what that’s supposed to mean,” Corey says, adding that if anything, his videos have inspired Lithuanians to return home.
“About 30-40% of my audience are Lithuanians living in the UK. I get messages saying, ‘Corey, I love seeing your perspective of my country. It’s made me think, and I’m moving back to Lithuania.’ So maybe, in that way, I am a coloniser,” he jokes.
Riding through the noise
Still, Corey acknowledges that discrimination is a big reason why foreigners struggle to stay in Lithuania. He recalls going out to bars in Kaunas with a dark-skinned friend from Somalia, when an older man refused to shake his friend's hand, calling it “dirty”.
“Now, why would he say that? It’s wild. So, I do understand some foreigners here, especially those who aren’t light-skinned. I imagine they go through a lot,” he shares.
Despite these challenges, Corey believes Lithuania offers plenty of opportunities for foreigners like him.
“I've had a lot of foreigners message me saying ‘We really don't like how we're treated here in this country, there aren’t many opportunities’ and I try to tell people on my videos that there is opportunity if you look for it hard enough, but you've just got to try hard, and you just need to ride through the noise, be consistent. Then you'll realise you can actually live a very good life here.”
What keeps him grounded, he says, is the gym. “If I didn’t go to the gym, I’d go absolutely crazy,” he laughs. A gym partner is the only thing he misses from his home country.
“I don't really miss anything about the UK. My life is pretty much the same here. The only thing that’s different now is that I go to the gym on my own.”
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