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levels.io
Hi, I'm @levelsio. I'm launching 12 startups in 12 months: Nomad Jobs, GifBook, Nomad List, Tubelytics, Go Fucking Do It and Play My Inbox. I like to build companies and believe remote work is the future. Previously, I founded a music network on YouTube w/ 100+ mln views. Follow my adventures on Twitter, AngelList, LinkedIn or read all my posts. Reach me? Tweet me.
6 days ago

This is what happens when FlightFox copies your entire site without attribution

This just happened:

Last month, I launched Nomad List, it tells you the best cities to live and work remotely and is targeted towards startups with remote teams and digital nomads. It’s part of my challenge to launch 12 startups in 12 months.

Just now, FlightFox, a self-described marketplace of flight experts, launched a new page that looks eerily familiar to people that’ve seen my site Nomad List:

Even the city details themselves:

Eventhough they used the wrong picture for Chiang Mai as Yury notes:

It’s not just the concept of putting up a list of cities to work from remotely. That’s not unique. Sites before Nomad List have done it, and other startups are working in this space, like Teleport. But it appears as if FlightFox directly scraped my site, merely stripping out a few cities and adding a few others to make it look theirs.

They obviously thought it was to blatant and tried to cover it up quickly changing the title of the page from:

The 17 Best Cities To Live Cheaply for Nomads

to:

The 17 Best Cities To Live Cheaply

However, their Facebook page still show the old title:

Do I care? No I think it’s pretty awesome and flattering. And it shows direct market validation:

If a funded startup like FlightFox puts up a page like this, there’s obviously people interested in it. And the power of the internet is that people copy. But when you do it so blatantly, it’s common courtesy to link back, attribute and mention your source. And they didn’t. That’s not very nice. And it’s not very smart PR for them now either.

Especially not if you start denying it, then you’re pretty much asking for a social media storm:

However, I agree with @heyalexej, it’s done very well and it gives me some great cues on how to include hostel/hotel/apartment listings on my site.

They could’ve done it just a little more appropriately though. If they’d tweeted me or sent me an email to ask me to use my data, I’d love to share it. I even have an API they could use. Or even if they didn’t ask but just attribute Nomad List as a source. But they didn’t.

Twitter didn’t like it:

However, if they’d done it appropriately, we wouldn’t have all these tweets and this blog post and they wouldn’t have given Nomad List all this attention today! And who am I not to embrace that? ^____^

3 weeks ago

GifBook, the first animated GIF flip book

A few months ago, I set a goal to launch 12 startups in 12 months. They’re all minimum viable products, built to test a hypothesis and see if they can get a market fit in a month.

They’ve all been doing relatively well. 1) PlayMyInbox got covered by MTV and Lifehacker, 2) Tubelytics was quickly adopted by some big media brands, 3) GoFuckingDoIt went completely viral and was featured all over the media including TheNextWeb, AppSumo and WIRED, 4) NomadList surpassed all of them hitting #1 on Product Hunt and Hacker News and getting covered by Business Insider, Inc.com and Tim Ferriss and 5) Nomad Jobs which is soft-launched and slowly receiving coverage now. I’m slightly delayed now as the success of Nomad List was a bit overwhelming. But I’m almost back on schedule now.

This month, I’m launching the 6th startup. It’s called GifBook.io and it lets you order printed physical flip books from animated GIFs. If you like one too, you can go and order one now.

The problem

If Product Hunt teaches us one thing, it’s that GIFs are huge.

But there’s one tiny problem, they stop moving once you print them. It seems like a problem that we’ve put people on the moon but haven’t been able to put animated GIFs on paper.

nyancat3

The infallible Yahoo! Answers obviously agrees:

The solution

So even though this doesn’t seem like a world shattering problem, I thought, let’s fix this by letting people print animated GIFs as flip books.

I searched around and I couldn’t find anyone doing this yet. So there’s a space! Could this be a business though? I thought so. Printstagram started by simply printing Instagram photos as polaroids. Now they’ve grown into a real startup called Social Print Studio who offer a wide range of print products all connected to social networks. So it’s more serious than you think.

Finding a supplier

It’d be a bit of hassle to print them myself though. So I jumped on Twitter and asked if anyone knew a printing company that did flip books. A few replies later I had a supplier who sent me a sample flip book of Nyan Cat by post! Awesome.

The supplier’s minimum was 3 flip books. And it wasn’t very cheap either. So my margins are not very high right now. But if I get enough volume, I’m looking to push the cost down or otherwise switch suppliers. If you know anyone printing flip books, tweet me!

Front-end

Like with my previous projects, I tried to keep the interface of GifBook.io as simple as possible. It features two colors, a video of the flipbook as a background (simply shot on my iPhone by my dad, while I held the flipbook).

The upload bar is a nyan cat flying through space with its awesome rainbow cloud ^___^

It lets you upload a GIF or paste a URL, lets you position it by dragging the GIF, crop its size right for the flip book, and then in the same page moves you through the ordering process and processes your payment via the always awesome Stripe.

It took awhile to get everything working on mobile, but with 50% of my traffic mobile now, that’s mega important. People need to be able to upload a GIF, enter their CC details and order, all from a phone.

Back-end

The back-end required some not-so-trivial stuff. I needed to be able to resize/crop the GIF from the user’s input, cut up the animated GIF frames, and since the flip book was set at 50 frames by my supplier, I had to somehow make sure the image sequence I sent them was exactly 50 frames.

If you have a GIF with 25 frames, that’s easy. You show 1 frame for 2 pages and you have 50 pages filled. If you have 36 frames, what do you do though? Interpolating frames makes stuff look blurry and that’s sub-optimal. Another option would be to cut frames. Instead I opted to try and half or double the frame rate so it’d fit inside the 50 frames. Then if it was too many frames, I’d simply repeat the GIF until it was 50 frames long.

After cutting it up, the final image sequence is then sent to my supplier with the customer’s shipping address.

For now, I’ll be doing the payments to my supplier manually, but later, if there’s enough sales, I’ll automate that too. Right now it sums up the credit of each order’s costs and then at the end of the month I PayPal that amount.

Conclusion

My first physical product startup! I’m super excited and wonder how the internets will respond to this. It seems to me like a fun product to give to someone. I’ve shown my friends the sample flip books I got, and they liked it. I don’t know if liking it will be enough to buy it, but we’ll see in a month when I’ll update you on how this went! Fingers crossed :)

If it works, I can adapt this to print Vines, videos of Ryan Hoover’s face, YouTube/Facebook videos etc. That sounds like a fun market :)

Try it out

It’s live now, so go try it out at GifBook.io, upload your own GIF and let me know if you have any feedback or ideas to improve it. I’d love to hear from you on Twitter or at hello at levels.io. If you’d like to write about it, please do so, I need any press I can get!

2 months ago

How I build my minimum viable products

Since I’ve launched my 12 startups in 12 months challenge, the #1 question I get asked is about my work flow and how I can ship so fast. I don’t work particularly longer hours than most people (I think). I do work fast and rough. In this post, I’d like to show you the basics of how my I build my minimum viable products (or MVPs).

First, a public service announcement, I don’t do things conventionally and probably not according to the rules. Especially not with these 12 projects. So it’d be a bad idea to follow how I do things exactly. It’s probably better to just figure out your own workflow. That’s what I did.

Solve your own problems, or not?

I start with an idea. I built GoFuckingDoIt so I stopped procrastinating and was fined money if I didn’t finish what I said I would. Tubelytics was there to get a general overview of all my different YouTube channels performance. And when I wanted to know which cities had the best cost of living for a traveling nomad like me, I built NomadList.

As you see, most of my ideas are actually there to solve my own problems — as David Heinemeier Hansson calls it scratching your own itch).

Is that good though? As this article points out, we might need to consider that a majority of us doing this stuff are young white males. So if we only solve our own problems, we limit ourselves in audience and problem settings. I don’t think that’s bad necessarily. It’s great to start off by solving your own problems. Personally, in the long run, I’d like to build more stuff that has a wider impact though.

My development philosophy

In terms of development I sympathize highly with Colin from Customer.io whose site is aptly titled I Am Not A Programmer. I’m not and I don’t want to be one either. I just want my stuff to work and not break. Programming is not my passion. Making stuff is my passion. Just as I don’t like mathematics, but I like how you can apply it to build a skyscraper.

If something potentially takes off, I do want my code to be easily readable by other coders to refactor and/or scale it.

If you look at any of my sites, they’re very minimal [1] and basic [2]. That’s on purpose. I don’t have as much as time to build things big and I don’t see the point of building things big immediately. And I like minimal user interfaces. I don’t think a site needs to be filled with functionality from top to bottom.

My development environment

I don’t really have an IDE. I just code everything in Sublime Text 3, I highly recommend it to anyone.

To give you an idea, two years ago I was still using Notepad++ on Windows 7:

Sublime Text is great since it has auto completion, linting (e.g. live debugging of your code) and dark themes (like Soda) that don’t burn your eyes. The auto-completion and linting especially now saves me incredible amounts of time. If I type this:

<html

and press tab, Sublime auto-completes it into:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>

</body>
</html>

Sublime’s linting will visually show where I have errors in my PHP, JS or SCSS code. I also use CodeKit to compile/minify my JS and SCSS files. Like Sublime, it also supports linting. So if I don’t see the error in Sublime, CodeKit will simply pop up a window and tell me what’s wrong:

I didn’t have any of these features. I didn’t even have a local server, so I’d make a change to my code, then upload it to my development server (on DreamHost) and see if it worked. I developed entire sites like this. It would take 1000x more time though. I know, I know! Ridiculous. But what do you do if you don’t know?

I’d recommend anyone to use a MacBook or Mac to develop your stuff on. It helps so much that OSX is a lot like Linux. That means I can have an almost exact duplicate of my production environment (e.g. the actual Linode server where the live website is running) on my development environment (e.g. my MacBook). So I can code and test stuff without breaking the live site. It also allows me to develop my sites when I don’t have internet. To show you, above is my MacBook, below is my server:

You can do all of this in Windows too, but it’s not as smooth and your production and dev environment will look a lot different — that is, if you use a Linux server, which you should (you say Microsoft .NET? I say lulz were had!)

Design process

When designing I usually start off with an idea of how it should look in my head already. I usually draw it out on paper first. For example, this is GoFuckingDoIt.com (I know, it looks terrible!)

photo (12)

And then I just build it in Photoshop and evolve it further. If I need a stock photo, I always get a mock first from Stocksy. They have amazing, beautiful, authentic stock photography. Really special stuff. Then when I actually decide to use it, I pay $10 and I have it licensed!

Then I build it in HTML and CSS. That’s when things start changing. For example the name went from Just Fucking Do It to Go Fucking Do It, and I switched around the picture with another one from Stocksy:

Screenshot 2014-09-02 21.31.31

I then tweak it until the interface looks great. Then I make it responsive for mobile. I use Chrome’s new emulation feature to see how it looks on mobile. It’s quintessential right now to make sure your site looks great on any mobile device. 40% of my traffic comes from mobile now. People will simply leave your site if they can’t use it! Take it serious.

When the front-end is finished, I usually start building the back-end (the stuff on the server) and making it actually interactive.

Shared vs. private hosting

A year ago, I used to host all my sites with DreamHost. I was on there for years. My sites weren’t that special though so they didn’t need a lot resources. When I started doing intense background cron jobs though, I started getting messages telling me I should probably stop doing that and get my own server. Fair enough I thought, I’ll get my own.

I didn’t even know how a Linux shell worked back then. And it probably took me a week before I had a working server set up on Linode. But when it worked, it felt so much better to have my own server. I now owned the entire stack. From front-end, back-end to the server itself. That meant if something didn’t work, I could quickly find the problem, instead of relying on some hosting company fucking up their shit and me debugging it for 12 hours to then figure out it was their fault.

Tech stack

I have a very basic stack. It’s Nginx on Ubuntu on Linode with basic PHP, Node.JS, JS, CSS and HTML.

Linode
My server is hosted by the awesome guys and girls at Linode (yes that’s a referral link). I run all my sites (even this blog you’re looking at) on one virtual private server (VPS).

To show you how cheap it is: I pay $40/m for a Linode with 4 GB RAM, 4 CPU cores, 96 GB SSD storage and 4TB transfer i/o. You think that sounds slow and tiny? Yep, that’d be a slow MacBook, but as a server it’s really quite fast. It takes floods of users easily. To give you an idea, every time one of my sites gets press or is featured on Hacker News or Product Hunt, it’ll get flooded with users (often>1000 concurrent users per second).

It’s never went down yet either, except for the cases when I broke it myself :)

I love Linode’s dashboard too. I’ve tried AWS’s but it’s just too complicated for me. Like when I shut down an AWS instance, it loses all data? Sure that might sound logical to an engineer, but not to me. To me that’s just not very user friendly. Linode has a lot less features than AWS but in my case that’s good. It’s simple. You can deploy a server instantly with one button, install a Linux distribution on it and it’ll be up and running in 5 minutes.

Ubuntu
My server runs Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as its OS. Why? It seemed like the most common Linux distribution when I picked it. And LTS stands for long-term support, which means even if you don’t upgrade to the next versions, it’ll receive bug fixes for quite a few years.

Nginx
On top of that, I run a basic Nginx server with the PHP-FPM gateway installed to enable PHP to run. I love Nginx because it’s very maintenance free and even if you don’t tweak it after installing, it’s usually just crazy fast out of the box.

PHP/Node.JS
The back-end of the sites itself are mostly written in PHP. I’m always embarrassed when I have to tell people this, but to be fair PHP has gotten a lot better these days. I am feeling the pressure to start moving over to Node.JS though, although I’ve been saying that for awhile (it’s hard to switch engrained habits).

HTML/JS/SCSS
The front-end of the sites is written in hand-coded HTML (like most people still do) and just raw JS. I do use jQuery to make stuff easier. I use some parts of SCSS to speed things up, but mostly it’s just me typing raw CSS code.

Deploying fast
I like this setup, because I can deploy sites very fast. I’ll register a domain with NameCheap, use their FreeDNS to add DNS entries to point to my Linode VPS IP address. I’ll clone an existing nginx.conf (Nginx config file) from another domain, change a few things and upload it. Then I connect to my server, enter the command below:

sudo ln -s /srv/http/domain.com/app/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites/domain.com
sudo nginx -s restart

This links the nginx.conf file to the nginx server and then reloads the server and it’ll be live. I can do that in about 15 minutes. Which is crazy cool to me.

I remember it used to take me hours to add a new site/domain to DreamHost because I needed to get through their horribly slow web panel. SSH-ing into a server is definitely superior to a web panel. I figured that out fast.

Folder structure

Last year, I was obsessing about how my folder structure was supposed to look. My projects had become quite a mess and I started looking at popular frameworks to base a structure on. After months, I slowly evolved into using this structure:

/_assets
This is the folder I start with. It contains all the rough pre-dev assets like mock ups in Photoshop and Sketch of the interface and logo designs. Then when the site is developed, I put stuff like screenshots of press mentions in this folder. It’s pretty much everything that shouldn’t be on the server.

/public/assets/
This includes all public asset files. That means pretty much everything used by the front-end. CSS for styling, JS for client-side scripting, images in PNG etc. This should all be publicly accessible. All JS/CSS files are pre-processed from the /app/ folder.

/app/
This includes all front-end (SCSS, JS), back-end code (PHP, Node.JS) and also the server configuration in the nginx.conf file that Nginx uses. This folder isn’t accessible publicly by itself (only /public/ is accessible publicly). Instead, I use Nginx’s config file as a natural router to route specific URLs to specific PHP files. That allows me to control what applications are accessible by clients.

I use CodeKit to monitor this folder and automatically pre-process/minify/compile the SCSS and JS files to the /public/assets/ folder:

Screenshot 2014-08-29 17.35.40

/lib/
This includes all back-end server-side libraries and stuff I didn’t make myself and don’t want to edit. For example Stripe’s library for payment processing and Twitter’s OAuth library. Libraries are included from this folder by apps in the /app/ folder.

/workers/
This includes all app files that are scheduled and do stuff in the background by cron jobs. Think about sending out email queues or downloading/uploading data on a daily basis, like scraping or backing up files. I guess you could call them agents or daemons too.

/logs/
This includes simple .txt files to log stuff. If I do a scheduled cron job, I usually do it like this:

* * * * php -f /srv/http/domain.com/workers/doStuff.php> /srv/http/domain.com/logs/doStuff.txt

This enables me to quickly check up on the result of any scheduled jobs.

/data/
This includes all data used by the app. I actually shy away from using real database systems in the 12 startups. Instead I use JSON text files. Wow. Yes. What a shocker! So this is for example how NomadList‘s data looks. Every text file usually just contains a JSON encoded array of data. The string in the filename is an MD5 hash of what it’s about. With NomadList, that’s the city + state + country name.

So yep very rough. Is this a horrible idea? Sure. But I’m not a programmer and at this scale it’s fast to develop with. If there’s anything I hate more, it’s setting up a database structure. How the hell am I going to know what fields I will want to use? It’s slow and for me it seems super counter intuitive. Especially if you like to code fast.

You can always write a script that puts this in a MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL database later. I’d say if you’re getting sensitive user data though you will want to secure it in a more decent fashion.

My coding style

Except for jQuery, I don’t use any frameworks. Why? Because many times, they just make things more complex. I kind of just write code. I do want to keep things clean and fast though. I like DRY KISSes: Don’t Repeat Yourself and Keep It Simple Stupid. When I need a function or piece of code I already wrote before, I grab it from a previous project. That saves some time.

To-do lists

So how do I know what I’m doing in a day? I used to have serious difficulties getting tasks done. Trello helps a lot. It’s a kan-ban type system that lets you make lists with cards in it. Each card can be a task. You can arrange lists whichever way you want. And you can have multiple boards for different projects. Just go try it now, it’s free and awesome.

I have a particular workflow with Trello. I think I saw somebody else on Hacker News do this and that’s where I copied it from. I have a list for this year, this month, this week, today and now. When I go do something I drag it in to the ‘now’ list. That gives me an immediate sense of action and knowing what to focus on.

When I finish the task, I drag it to the list on the left. This list holds all completed tasks for this week. At the end of the week, I move this entire list out of the ‘to-do’ board to the ‘finished’ board.

Now it’s out of my way. This list is important because it gives you a sense of satisfaction and loose measurement of how productive your week is. And the fun thing is, after a while of doing this, you can go to the ‘finished’ board and see everything you did for the last X weeks. And it makes you feel quite productive and proud of yourself! ^_^

Conclusion

So that’s how I work! Not really special but since many people asked I thought this might help.

Like I said it’s probably not following any best practices. But it works. I actually ship products.

I think the most important thing to remember is that it doesn’t really matter how people do things. When I used to make electronic music, the forums would be full of people asking “which tools do XXX use?” and “which program do you make this bassline with”, and in the end it wouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you use PHP, Node.JS, Ruby or whatever hip new language. Everyone uses different tools and has their own ways and tricks. It’s really about what you’re best, quickest and most comfortable with.

When you are unified with your tools, you can really make anything ^_o

8 months ago

I’m Launching 12 Startups in 12 Months

I liked the idea of Jennifer Dewalt’s 180 websites in 180 days. However, unlike Jennifer who learned web development from scratch, I can already build stuff. My challenge is to actually finish and launch my projects. So for the next 12 months, I’ve set the goal to launch 12 startups in 12 months.

Problem one: finishing

We creatives have one common problem: finishing things. From musicians to writers to developers, we are perfectionists and projects simply never are “just done”. There’s always that extra part to arrange, that extra chapter to write or that extra feature add. Then when our projects are close to finish, we forget about them and go to the next one, without even launching them. We like the feeling of starting something “new”, we despise the feeling of finishing something “old”.

Problem two: launching

And then there’s our other problem: fear of failure. We are scared shitless to launch “our baby” we spent months on building out into the world. Why? Because in our head we have this perfect idea of how the launch should be. We’ll get major press coverage and lots of users signing up. However in practice, we’ll probably never be able to fit that fantasy with reality. The fear of failure takes over so we don’t put enough effort into launching or we don’t launch at all. Because what if anybody would actually use what we built? They might hate it! So better to not launch at all. It’s a destructive vicious cycle resulting in literally nothing. No progress whatsoever.

It’s killing good ideas

Like so many, I’ve suffered from these problems for years. These two problems are killing good ideas. I’ve seen it happen with myself and as much with others. You see people actively working on their new startup. They’ve got a great idea, they’re enthusiastic and are making long hours. They’re putting lots of effort in to something they’re passionate about. But then when I look up their startup a year later, it’s still the same landing page collecting beta emails. I can’t even count how many startups I know that have had this fate. It’s detrimental.

Changing habits

So I’ve decided to take things into my own hands. I want to change my habits and force myself to finish what I start. For the next 12 months, I’m launching one startup every month. This includes picking an idea, developing it and launching it to press.

It’ll be like a tiny personal hyperfast incubator.

We’ll see where I am in 12 months, but I think I’ll have more to show for my name.

“!@&#*(#@, these aren’t startups!”

I expect many people to go mental seeing me use the term “startup” for this. But actually I think that’s what it is. A startup doesn’t have to be a world changing high impact $1B+ company from the start. That’s a myth. AirBnB started as a company selling Obama-themed cereal, while Dropbox was just Drew Houston building a graphical user interface for rsync as a side-project. The big vision happened after they found a market fit with their MVPs.

Many people wait to get that big vision while staying idle. I don’t think that’s the way though. By just doing something you position yourself ahead of most people already, and you’ll probably do the wrong thing. But that’s not the point. You’ll figure out what you need to do by exposing yourself to the world (and its market forces). And especially if you’re not experienced like me, I think it’s better to start small first, and slowly build bigger things. By doing nothing, you figure out exactly nothing.

So let’s define a startup:

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

— Eric Ries in Startup Lessons Learned

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of “exit.” The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.

— Paul Graham in Growth

Combining and minifying those, my definition of a startup is:

A startup delivers a new product and grows it fast

Delivering a new product is the easy part, growing it fast is the hard part. And if there’s no market fit after launching an MVP, it becomes even tougher. My plan is to see if I can get market fit in one month, and if it doesn’t show any signs of being somewhat in demand, I consider it failed.

My progress report

I’ll be updating my progress here with links to posts about each month’s startup.

1. March 2014 — Play My Inbox

Play My Inbox collects music from people’s inbox and playlists it in a visual music player. Try it here (read my debriefing on the launch here)

2. April 2014 — Go Fucking Do It

GoFuckingDoIt forces you to reach your goals by a certain deadline, because if you don’t it’ll charge your card. Try it here (read my debriefing on the launch here)

3. May 2014 — Tubelytics

Tubelytics is a real-time analytics dashboard SaaS for YouTube publishers and major media brands. It lets you instantly track hundreds of channels, videos and networks. Try it here

4. July 2014 — NomadList

NomadList is a live index of the best cities to live and work remotely. It scores cities based on cost of living, weather, internet speed and many other crowdsourced metrics. It sells city-specific guide books for digital nomads to quickly set up once they arrive in a city and nomad kits which include a coworking day pass, a SIM card, and hotel stay. Try it here (read my debriefing on the launch here)

5. August 2014 — NomadJobs

NomadJobs is job board for remote workers and digital nomads. It features only startups that work 100% distributed like Buffer, Zapier, Sqwiggle and Automattic. Try it here

6. September 2014 — GifBook
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GifBook lets you upload your favorite animated GIFs and order high-quality printed flip books custom-made from them. Try it here

3 weeks ago

On Thailand’s immigration police targeting digital nomads

Jon Myers just tweeted me that in the last 24 hours, Thailand’s immigration police has begun rounding up foreigners working from PunSpace in Chiang Mai, checking their visas and detaining them. Digital nomad Johnny FD is detained too and reporting live about it on on his blog.

I’ve heard from many people that Nomad List is having a considerable effect on the city now. With Chiang Mai being #1 on the list, there’s now an influx of thousands of new people relocating to Chiang Mai and that’s obviously getting the focus of Thailand’s government.

So I feel responsible to talk about this.

The law is lagging behind technology

Working visas are there to protect local workers from their jobs being taken away by foreigners. But the stuff people build in Chiang Mai are not taking away Thai jobs at all. They’re not even targeting Thailand as market. The people working there are freelancers or people building their own companies and startups, many focused on a worldwide market. The law is simply lagging behind the technological developments.

Thailand can be a legal remote working hub

Thailand has been at the center of the remote work and digital nomad community. It should see this as an opportunity instead of a problem. It’s in a position to become one of the first legal hubs for remote workers.

Nomads should be taxed

I’ve said it before, nomads should be taxed. Find a construction where they can pay for the infrastructure they use. While still making it possible for them to stay short-term and not have to register everywhere and fill out 12 forms. I’d say make them pay a monthly flat amount to work legally. Like ~USD 300.

Caution

Everyone thinking of working remotely in any third-world country should always be cautious. To work without a working visa is a legal grey area so stuff like this can happen. Right now, you DO need a working/business visa for most countries. I don’t agree with that but until governments catch up that’s just the way it is. If you don’t want to take the risk of being detained, it’s very important to make sure your legal situation is in order BEFORE you board your plane.

I’ve added this warning on Nomad List to inform people:

Screenshot 2014-10-02 01.09.00

Update: Tech In Asia reports Thai authorities say they weren’t targeting digital nomads in particular, but just making sure everyone was having their passports on them. That seems like a face saving argument. Other people mentioned to me this was planned for at least a month. I think they were surprised by the amount of bad PR this got. Not a good time for bad PR with Thai tourism down due to the coup either.

Time to get your act together, Thailand.

(Picture by Johnny FD)

1 month ago

Why traveling makes you feel lost

The self is highly adaptable to its external environment, and ironically, the more you change your external environment, the more you lose track of who you actually are, because there’s nothing solid to compare yourself against.

With frequent travel, so many variables in your life are changing that it’s hard to isolate a control variable and see the effect everything else has on it. You are in a constant state of upheaval.

Frequent travel puts your identity into constant flux where it’s impossible to distinguish with certainty who you are or what you know, or whether you really know anything at all.

And this is a good thing.

Because uncertainty breeds skepticism, it breeds openness, and it breeds non-judgment. Because uncertainty helps you to grow and evolve.

And when you go long enough being uncertain of who you really are, what results is a form of subtle, long-term meditation — a persistent and necessary acceptance of whatever is arising (..)

And at some point, you just stop asking questions. And start listening. To the waves and the wind and the calls for love in all of the beautiful languages you will never understand.

You just let it be. And keep moving.

—Mark Manson on 5 Life Lessons From 5 Years of Traveling the World

2 months ago

Danism & Rae – Sirens

Haven’t heard such a big tune in ages. Played on Shadow Child‘s show on Rinse FM last week (audio here).

So Danism is actually D&B producer Nu:Tone I heard. I love how this tune is completely out of the box and pushing house forward — can you still call it house though, just screams we should call this entire genre “UK” instead.