Johannes Voelkner: How I built a location independent business while traveling the world [Nomad Summit 2020]
This past weekend in Chiang Mai, Thailand, was the 8th Nomad Summit.
I attended the full conference day on Saturday & then taught a writing workshop on Monday.
Below are my notes from Johannes Voelkner’s presentation: How I built a location independent business while traveling the world.
For an overall review of the Nomad Summit event, venue, high-level takeaways, book recommendations, and links to all the other speaker notes I took, check out my main review:
- Founder of Nomad Cruise
- Made an app to sell cards his mom was drawing during depression / therapy, now has sold over $3M of cards (therapists use them in therapy) using AdWords — Therapiebox
- First Nomad Cruise: saw a cheap cruise ticket & thought it would be a fun thing to do with a group of people to connect, network, and travel together — wanted to not travel alone
- Traveling frequently takes up your time & energy to plan, and we have limited resources, so if you use it on that then you aren’t using it on your personal projects or business
- Traveling slow (monthly) helps you enjoy both benefits of travel and your work / life
- Develop a schedule for the month so that you have a rhythm to follow that enables / empowers what you’re trying to prioritize (seeing the city, working, staying healthy, etc)
- Destinations: mix between places you want to visit & places you can imagine spending your future (testing out the key priorities / values for establishing a home base)
- Go remote before you travel — need to have income stream
- Give without asking for anything in return
- Your first customers can become your best promoters: treat them well
- Learn to lead — get support and help, learn to delegate your work, let go of control; hire people who are passionate about what you’re doing
- Travel with purpose
- Be in love with the process, not the goal — don’t stake your happiness only on the end result, esp as that may not happen as expected
He focused a lot on establishing good habits and having patience, and the more I understand & respect my need for routines, the better I make progress on things that matter to me.
Katherine Conaway is a digital nomad, working remotely while she travels the world — on the road since June 2014.
