Ask HN: Technomading? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Technomading?

80 pointsnoodle57 comments

a now dead submission from earlier today inspired me to ask about this.

its been a personal goal of mine for a while to be able to do this before i would want/need to settle down: setting things up in my life in such a way that i can grab a laptop and travel the world. travel to a new country, stop for a while, see and do things, and pop open the laptop to do enough work to fund the traveling.

the intent would be to stay in one place for longer periods (months, depending on the visa) so that work would be less random and so that i could properly experience the new location's culture, atmosphere, etc.. the intent would also be to aim for the more inexpensive places so that i wouldn't necessarily have to work 40/wk to get by. kind of like where the hell is matt (http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/) except less dancing (also, i had this idea in my head way before i ever saw matt's stuff).

we're a community of smart people who like to solve problems. so, i imagine someone else has gone down this road. i was just curious about this, since i've done a lot of thinking (read: daydreaming) about it myself lately. anyone have any thoughts/experiences/resources/insights/etc.?

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I am living this life right now. Lived (mostly) in Vancouver and Buenos Aires last year (with 1 month stops in LA, NY, and Toronto, and purely fun travel to Antarctica, Ireland and South Africa).

In 09 I've been to India (vacation), London (worked), Vancouver (worked), and I'm currently in Italy (both vaca + work). Heading to Budapest in two days to rent a place for 3m.

The most common question I've gotten is how to fund this. I've funded this with consulting gigs and living in cheap-ish places - living in Buenos Aires, for example, is a great way to bootstrap a startup. Building a more scalable biz to do this - consulting is a fine way to make a living, but a terrible way to build wealth.

It's great to see the world and get a better sense of the nuances of a culture than a hit-and-run trip. But it's not without its challenges. Off the top of my head, here are three:

- the biggest (for me) being balancing the desire to explore a new city with work

- A close runner up (believe it or not) is finding good broadband

- Building a community where you move to is often tough, though meeting people through couchsurfing.com has been awesome

If you have specific questions, please fire away here. I'm also going to teach a free class on www.edufire.com about this soon and I'll drop you an email about it if you email me directly (blog at reemer dot com).

There's more about how to live the technomad life in this interview I did: http://mixergy.com/business-nomad/

And on my blog (too busy bootstrapping to update since Feb, but some info there): http://howsthewifi.com

EDIT: An afterthought - whatever you do, don't let someone else tell you it's not possible or there's a better way to do it. Figure it what you want, then explore your options yourself (learning from people who've done it).

The benefits of living like this will do two things - build your self-awareness and build your confidence in yourself. It's close to the best way I've found to take responsibility for my life - I'm eating what I kill and living in cities where I know nobody and don't speak the language. You'll learn a hell of a lot about what you're capable of and that's the best damn part imho.

A close runner up (believe it or not) is finding good broadband

I totally believe it. My ex-wife and I did a few years of nomading (just in North America and the Caribbean) in the first half of this decade, and finding internet connectivity was absolutely the most difficult thing about it. I imagine it's actually considerably easier, now.

what about options like the verizon global broadband satellite service? or similar things? are there any globally-available reasonably-priced global mobile broadband solutoins? tethering? etc.?

I've briefly looked up mobile satellite internet, and the cost is extremely restrictive: starting at like $600/month for a few hundred megs of transfer. This was for the ultra-portable satellite setups (the kinda thing you can throw in a backpack or a laptop case).

Any satellite service is pretty poor when the thing you really need connectivity for is SSH. These days, I could get away with a 3G tether in those situations, but cellphone internet wasn't like that then.

thought this would be an interesting note to add to your post here:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=inc...

another question for you -- how do you deal with currency issues, if there are any?

i have bank acct's in canada and the us. take out $ in foreign currency using my ATM (they generally give you the best rate).

if you meant something else by "issues", let me know :)

Once between YC cycles Jessica and I lived in Paris for a month, and I spent the time writing software for YC. (I wrote the code we use to generate funding documents.) I rented a separate studio as an office and went there every day to work. It is kind of cool to work in a place instead of just being a tourist. But I found I missed the hacking community somewhat.

I wrote the code we use to generate funding documents.

Did you use arc? If not, why not? If so how does it compare to HN in terms of complexity?

Did you learn anything worthwhile?

Yes.

    > (/ (codetree "docs.arc") (codetree "news.arc"))
    1399/6586

I learned it's hard to write document management systems.

The good thing is you will need to make comparatively very little amount of money. If you can make around $25K/year you can live very well in S & SE Asia, parts of S. America and I would guess Africa.

If you work as a freelance developer, and have already established a good network, it is fairly easy to lead this kind of life. Working remotely is very common, and if the client knows you are good, he would not care where in the world you are. But if you don't have an established network, it is harder to find work while you are on the road.

Starting your business is also claimed as a possibility. But I personally have not come across anybody running a successful business and spending a lot of time on the road. But I am sure some people pull it off, a la Tim Ferriss.

Oh, and teaching English. Great way to see the world, and money is good in places like Japan, Korea and increasingly China.

Even if you cannot figure out a way to work from the road, just save some money and get going. It really requires very little money, e.g. you can explore the whole of SE Asia for about $1K/month.

Good luck!

To teach English, you should know another language too, isn't it?

It is very much possible to live in places like SE Asia for $1k per month (I'm from India, it wouldn't take even $1k, especially if you are single)

not necessarily. the example i know about is japan -- many places prefer people who don't speak japanese. it forces interaction in english, the language they want to learn.

To teach English, you should know another language too, isn't it?

Nope. In fact if you are the stereotypical American with no accent, speak great English and know none of the foreign language you are usually far better off because they only want you speaking in English and teaching in English.

Not to mention the better schools get to have their American "poster boy" so they can show they've got quality English teachers in their school.

(This is at least what I gathered from a number of teachers over in Taiwan when I considered doing it).

the stereotypical American with no accent

Not at all. I've got a few friends in South Korea teaching English. None of them know Korean.

How do they teach then? Are they teaching students who already have some English knowledge? Your friends are helping them improve, instead of teaching from scratch? Its understandable if thats the case.

Most of the times they have some prior background in the language. But often you teach to very young kids as well, in that case you are usually paired with a local teaching assistant.

ok, that makes sense. any idea how the pay is? enough to sustain oneself and travel?

http://www.eslcafe.com/

Check the left hand side for the forums, there's volumes of information on just about any question you could ask.

Tealit.com is good for Taiwan.

Second language acquisition beyond entry level should be in the target language. There are methods ( http://www.everythingesl.net/inservices/language_stages.php is a quick example ) that require no actual native language knowledge on the part of the teacher.

I haven't taught a second language myself, but I am around a few people who teach or have taught languages, and I've picked up on it a bit.

I share your.. concerns.

Of course, the people teaching English without knowing any of the local language would claim everything is alright.

But it's undeniable that teaching will be more efficient if you do know some of the local language too.

Yes: do it.

You'll probably read lots about people doing global consulting, or working remotely to pay for it, planning for months, getting travelogues, etc...

But most people who have done this over the years didn't have that luxury and haven't let it stop them. They got passports, visas, saved some cash...and then just walked out the front door. Really. The hardest part in something like this is most likely that first step you take.

So stop thinking, dreaming, etc and just go. Even if you stay within this country for a few months first. Just Go.

I've done this to some degree. My suggestion would be to build a product that throws off income rather than try to support yourself through remote contract work. A desktop app, iPhone app, subscription web app, or even ad supported web app. This will probably make your life better even if you aren't traveling.

+1. Consulting requires a sales pipeline. If you have a good network, that might fill the pipeline for you... You certainly don't want to be competing on oDesk and the like from abroad.

i agree, as i mentioned in a post on one of the other comments, i think the best way to make this happen would be through developing a subscription-based app of some sort and spend the "working time" maintaining/improving it.

The way I've been doing something similar is to take deployed defense contracts which last 3-9 months at a time (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.), and make enough during that period to live for the rest of the year (and a couple additional years).

I've also been working on startup projects in my spare time, since I have good Internet connectivity while doing the day job. The "non-deployed" time can be spent traveling, or working full-time on any of the startup projects which have traction -- with the added benefit that I can provide my own financing up to a series A.

Somehow I get more done on projects in early stages when they're "side projects", and this way I don't have to worry about my burn rate during early stages (since it's substantially negative).

There are tax benefits ($91k/yr deduction) for being outside the USA 330 days/yr, so once you've done 200-250 days deployed as a contractor in a year, it makes sense to spend the balance outside the US as a tourist -- at a high marginal tax rate that's basically $30k, and I can live comfortably in Vancouver, Bali, New Zealand, Japan, etc. for a few months on way less than that.

The #1 thing I've learned is to totally automate my "administrative life" -- I use a mail-scanning mail forwarder, autopay on all my bills, etc. When you travel a lot, it's easy to miss a credit card bill, and it can be a black mark on your credit for 7 years.

The other nice thing is most of these contracts are "go home at night and not worry about it", vs. normal consulting where you can be called back at any time to fix something. And, the separation between dayjob and any personal projects is a lot easier in an admin/ops contract than in a developer dayjob.

I've been doing this for 8 years now. First mostly in south america, then since 2006 in asia, mostly in China.

The first few years were fine - I enjoyed being in a totally different place. But eventually I missed having other hackers around. My social life took place mostly online.

Earlier this year I finally launched

http://www.cocovivo.com

So far, experiences from that are: -people differ in so many ways- it's hard to find a group that works together. -some people take the day-to-day distractions better than others. Some thrive by being able to got for a swim whenever they want, some get restless and can't get work done -our location may be a bit too extreme (we're off the grid on an island in the caribbean, solar + long distance wifi link from town)

Connectivity has improved a lot.. When I started in 2001, writing web apps in Java, my makefile included a target for copying the code to a floppy disk, and adding pscp.exe a .bat file to upload everything to the server so my client could test it. Bugs would come in the form of long emails.

Definitely much better now... ssh is sometimes a problem, but now even getting through the Great Firewall of China with ssh is alright.

Overall, I can really recommend trying this out. I'd very much like to contribute my thoughts and experiences to someone willing to build a community around this... I'm not enough of a community builder and too busy with work to do this by myself. Contact me (rick@outscape.net) if interested!

I would love to do this as well. I think the real challenge is finding a source of income you can do 20 hours a week over the internet that can still support you.

Some useful links on the subject: http://locationindependent.com/ http://www.workingnomad.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technomad

I did this for over a year with my wife and kid. I originally planned on quitting my job as a government contract and doing only freelance, but instead ended up working things out so I could work remotely ~4-6 hours a day. It was nice having a fixed schedule and fixed paycheck and it left my mind free to enjoy Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina.

I can't recommend it highly enough, it was surprisingly easy to do and definitely one of the best years of my life.

Through independent contracting it's easy enough to just take 3 months off and travel off savings.

I've also had contracts that were almost exclusively remote work. I would check-in first and say "hey, are you going to need me in any meetings in the next 30 days, because I'm thinking of to [blank_city] for a bit."

They were always cool with it.

your dream is a good one. believe it or not your best route to a sustainable version of this is a startup. why? - you need to love something in order to be dedicated to it wherever and whenever (its mostly about time zones). - you want something where effort=return and bullshit = zero.

no matter what path you take to achieve this kind of freedom balance will be required. in the case of your own business you will need to spend lots of in person time with your partners and have great discipline with communications. if you don't have pre-existing relationships of several years that's how long will it take to get started. at least it has in my case. the payoff has been huge; its lead to a company where everyone lives and travels entirely as they want. good luck

Read 4 hour workweek if you haven't already, it describes this exact lifestyle.

As for funding the lifestyle, check out affiliate marketing, it's a great business. I'm now at the point where I have enough campaigns(and SEO traffic) running on autopilot where I only have to work 1-2 hours a day online to maintain an income in the low six figures. I've been thinking of doing the travel thing myself. I'm at the point now with my work where I can work from anywhere in the world(or an internet cafe), or even not work at all and still generate decent revenue, I think traveling the world while I'm young and free from commitment is a great idea. For cheap travel destinations with good Internet I've heard good things about S.E Asia, especially Thailand.

As I mentioned in another thread, I'm a U.S. citizen doing web dev in the Philippines. I would like to start checking out other places soon but for right now I'm still trying to get used to my first move to a new country.

There are a ton of people doing this and writing about it, so just do a search on the net. Make a list of places you would like to go and do the research on each place.

Considerations, especially for starting out, is visa, language, infrastructure, cost of living and other items.

For example, the Philippines has an easy visa where you only have to do visa runs once every 16 months. English is spoken nearly everywhere which isn't a small village off the beaten path. The infrastructure is not the best in some areas. I have to deal with a lot of brownouts and the internet has it's issues sometimes as well. Thailand is probably just a little more expensive than the Philippines but has better infrastructure. You don't want to be in the middle of a project and then have the power go out, but it happens.

I generally keep pretty busy as a contractor but I know developers here who will do a 3K site and then take the next couple of months off.

Ultimately, if you have an income and a bit of savings it's pretty easy. Just make sure you have enough savings to get you through a six month dry period and then enough extra to buy the next flight out of the country in case you need to leave in a hurry. Take a month or so break from work so that you have plenty of time to focus on getting settled in your new destination, especially if it's your first move. After that, perhaps you can get up to speed faster with future moves.

here are two decent blogs to check out. also, the main point from The Four Hour Work Week on the subject seems important: automation needs to be built into your venture from the beginning.

http://locationindependent.com/blog/2008/10/23/6-things-you-...

http://thegrowinglife.com/2008/03/lifestyle-design-and-4-hou...

I worked from Beijing during the Olympics last year for 3 months. The hardest part of the setup was securing an apartment on a short term lease with broadband from a few thousand miles away. I had to hire a guy that went from apt to apt then uploaded pictures to me at night. You definitely want to see pictures. I also had no clue where the "hip" parts of the city were, so I spent many hours just talking about the various Beijing neighborhoods and prices. Then we had to negotiate a short term lease, and pray that the landlord would honor that when I arrived.

It all went rather smoothly (it helps that I speak Mandarin and knew some trusty locals).

But while I was there, I kept thinking how difficult it would be for someone who didn't know anyone in Beijing and who didn't speak Mandarin to set this up. And what if I wanted to do something like this in, say, Cairo? It'd be very difficult.

I think setting up apartments around the world for technomads would be a great business idea. All that'd be required would be a clean place with broadband, hot shower and a bonus would be a nearby co-working space for local or expat geeks.

I have shared this dream at various points in my day-to-day grind...I think online poker would be one fairy reasonable approach. Depending on skill level, one could make a fairly good living grinding it out for (insert reasonable time here) a day. Just a thought, I think it could be a hard way to make an easy living.

I know a bunch of guys straight out of college who do this, quite successfully. There are a lot of degenerates in the online poker scene, but these kids all have their heads screwed on straight and are using poker as a means to travel and live around the world.

One of my favorite stories was when I was at a cafe in Buenos Aires working for an afternoon with these guys. After about 5h we decided to adjourn to a bar, adn I was chatting with one of the poker players (who's 25):

Me: "How'd it go today John?"

John: "Not bad, I'm up 15k today."

Me: ?!?!.... OMG!

J: "Yeah, it was a good day. But there are some days when I lose 13k."

Dealing with the emotional swings would be the toughest part of playing poker online, according to these guys.

Exactly. I have experienced this first-hand, and my swings are much smaller than that. The thing is, anything worth a spit is going to be hard; there are swings in "regular" professions as well. Learning to deal with them is part of growing as a professional, in my opinion. I think that there are many life lessons to be learned at the table, virtual or felt, and mental toughness is one that can be extremely beneficial to someone traveling the globe. There isn't a swing out there a pint or four can't cure!

Also check out http://soultravelers3.com/

They're a family of three (hubby, wife and a kid) working and traveling, all over the world. They're blogging their experience. Exactly the same as you say, except you're probably much younger than the couple.

In some ways I feel bad for the kid. A typical symptom of a third culture kid is lack of the feeling of "home" anywhere. This kid will be a TCK to the extreme.

I wonder if a tech-nomad version of couchsurfing would work out or not as a new kind of community.

cool idea

Yes, in fact the beginnings of a trip were organized through Hacker News a few months ago: http://coworkthailand.com/

I think these specific plans fell through, but I am planning something similar. Also, there's a commune of people doing this at http://www.cocovivo.com/

wow I have been thinking exactly the same thing. Kudos to you!

Over the past few months I've been aggressively trying to pick up freelance work on top of my day job, and it's paying off. I'm getting close to the point where I think I can adequately finance myself.

I don't think there's any reason to be tethered to a place if you don't want to be.

Anyone know of good spots to go as a hacker guy? I'm from the Northeast so I'm thinking of hitting Austin first off the bat and explore the US, but where else in the world would be a good place to live for a few months?

i have a similar goal.. i have a number in mind, once i make that much i plan to stop working for money

I used to nurture that dream as well. Now that I am older and wiser, I think it's a fantasy.

I honestly think it would be better to get 6-month or 9-month contract jobs, work like hell during that time, and then take some months off to see the world. And don't take your laptop with you ;-)

I have a bunch of Norwegian friends who did this. They would work March-September in Norway, when the weather isn't so bad, and then they would spend the winter months in Thailand, Bali, etc. I think this is the optimal scenario because work is separated from travel. When you're working, you are just working. When you're traveling, you're free to enjoy the places you visit and don't have to worry about deadlines, internet outages, etc

I think it's a good point. But I think - and never having traveled for an extensive period of time, maybe I'm wrong - just traveling could get old after a while.

I think having something to do in a place - even if it's entirely remote, but having something to do besides lay on the beach - could be grounding. Also, especially abroad where the cost of living isn't so high, if you can get by with 10/20 hour work weeks that leaves plenty of time to explore a city and make friends.

Again, never done extensive dedicated traveling so I can't say personally. But that's my feeling.

Ditto, except without the older and wiser part, and with 'tried it, and didn't work out so well.' (I'm in Toronto for 4 months. Didn't know /anyone/ here when I came here. Mainly working, but it's not a high stress job because I'm still in college.)

It's always seemed to me that you don't really experience the culture of a place without living/working there for a reasonably extended period of time. So, I understand where the OP's motivation to do this stems from. However, honestly, people working in most places, aren't going to be willing to chat with you about cultural differences. They're busy working, hanging out with their existing friend groups, etc. You either end up very lonely and doing things by yourself, or spending a great deal of effort in making friends for a short period of time.

Doing what the OP wants to do would end up being a lesson in how to make new friends very quickly very often. Or, you might find out that you really like [x] location and stay there!

i agree that this is probably easier and accomplishes a similar goal, its not quite the same and not quite what i'd like to end up doing. may end up having to wander down this path though, as a compromise.

i think the underlying concept behind what i'd like to accomplish is the aspect of freedom associated with it. doing a constant cycle of hard work and then vacation doesn't quite have as much of that freedom to it.

beyond that, working a few hours a day and/or being able to work when i'd prefer to do it would probably leave me more satisfied and productive with the work i'm doing than if i were chained to a desk slaving away to ensure a few extra weeks vacation.

The way I see things:

Suppose I want to hire you for a few months. You tell me you will be traveling in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand for 6 months. You tell me you will have access to the internet and work while on the move.

I would think you're not committed enough. I would also worry that you may get your laptop stolen with proprietary data on it while on a bus trip through the Cambodian jungle. And I am worried that you will have trouble accessing the internet in some remote locations, which would cause you to miss deadlines. To cut a long story short, there are too many risks. I would be better off hiring someone else.

The freedom would be great. Everyone would love to have the freedom to travel around. That does not mean it's not a fantasy.

Why not travel around and do rentacoder.com programming gigs once in a while?

oh, i agree. i don't think that i would be able to procure many longer term gigs like that, unless i had some special connections. the scheduling alone would be rough.

i think the ideal solution would be to do something like create my own subscription-based niche web app that would hopefully garner enough users to support the process (which i am in fact working on doing now). and then spend the 'work time' performing maintenance and improving it. and, if extra income is necessary, procure short-term gigs that i could knock out in days/weeks.

If you're working for yourself, then it could work.

Revenue is just one part of the picture. If you can lower your costs dramatically, then you don't need much revenue to support your nomadic lifestyle.

When traveling around Poland, I met a couple of Brits who had moved to Poland for some months to work on their startups. They did freelance work over the internet to pay for their expenses. Thing is, living in Poland you bleed off money a lot slower than you would in London, and you enjoy a much better lifestyle for the same price.

> Why not travel around and do rentacoder.com programming gigs once in a while?

I was considering trying this in the near future. Has anyone here used it (or odesk)? If so what was your experience? Is it difficult to get jobs given that depending on where you are people in other countries may be able to undercut your price by a significant amount?

You don't have to go global, you can be a nomad in you own country. This guy was doing it before broadband (or the internet as we know it) existed.

http://microship.com/resources/technomadic-tools.html

Being a nomad in one's country is fun if one's country is big. I come from a tiny European country which would take only a few weeks to explore, eh eh.

That's a beautiful story. Thanks for sharing the URL.

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