If you’re a digital nomad, meeting other nomads and entrepreneurs as you travel should be pretty high on your agenda. The benefits of tapping in to the accumulated wealth of local and business knowledge will make a huge difference to your travelling experience and potentially open you up to new business ideas and opportunities you may not have realised.
I’ve been using 4 main resources whilst I’ve been moving around to connect with people, make friends and create opportunities.
#nomads
#nomads, also known as Hashtag Nomads, is a series of different chat rooms created by Levels, the guy that bought put together the Nomad List.
There are many chat rooms, covering every country and city you can think of. There are also more general channels about topics like finding work. As you can see I’m currently in the Barcelona channel organising my next adventure. In the Phuket channel I met one digital nomad training on Soi Tad-ied who then introduced me to 5 others on the street that I didn’t know existed! I spent months thinking I was the only one here. Since then I’ve met a few more people in Phuket through #nomads.
#nomads requires a one time fee which fluctuates. Originally it used to be free, a great move to gain traction, then I think it went to $10, $15, I think I paid $25 and currently it’s at $35. Sometimes there will be a 24 hour period where all signups are free. The money seems to be going towards building the community and creating new forums etc
Whatever price #nomads is, you should sign up immediately and get it over with as it will be a huge benefit to your social life and it can make things a lot easier. The day I registered I joined the Ho Chi Minh channel, was offered an apartment which turned out to be in the centre of digital nomadville and met a great bunch of people. It paid for itself in that one day and has been an awesome resource ever since.
Levels has also put together the Nomad Forum. Slowly he’s building out a digital nomad empire and doing quite well with it!
The Dynamite Circle
The Dynamite Circle, aka DC, is a forum created by the Tropical MBA guy, it’s been about for a few years so is already quite established.
The cost of the DC is in my mind a point of contention, either $147 a quarter or $499 a year. That’s expensive considering in essence it’s a paywall surrounding user generated content, but I’m bitterly resubscribing as the value, socially, to my trip to Barcelona will be amazing. Everyone I have met that is a DC member so far has been totally awesome so I guess to a certain extent having such a high subscription fee keeps the riffraff out … ahem!
The DC also put on numerous social events and conferences, your subscription doesn’t cover the cost of these though, it just lets you buy a ticket, a pretty expensive ticket. Baring in mind that one of the best decisions I’ve made in the last 12 months was to attend the Drop Ship Lifestyle conference, regardless of the cost these kinds of things are great ideas to do.
I really need to use my Dynamite Circle account a lot more to justify it’s high price, so I’ll probably do another write up after 3 months in Barcelona after I’ve fully got to grips with it and worked out what else it has to offer.
Facebook Groups
Most of the places I’ve visited have a nomad related Facebook group. The Chiang Mai Facebook group has become so popular it’s had to split off in to separate other groups to separate out business chat and general Chiang Mai chat as the traffic was getting pretty heavy. Currently there are over 5000 members.
There wasn’t a Phuket Facebook group so I started one which is growing in popularity. Physically there’s a bit of a divide though as so far the Phuket nomads have fallen in to 2 groups, people in Patong on one side of the island and people training on Soi Tad-ied, e.g. Tiger Muay Thai, on the other side. The Soi Tad-ied group is pretty stable, meeting up almost daily, with core members who have been here for 2 or more years. The Patong side is a lot more sporadic though, with people coming over for just a week or 2 and never really integrating as there are generally few nomads in Patong at the same time and crossing the island for lunch with the Soi Tad-ied crew is a bit of a logistical nightmare for a casual tourist. So far we have just 39 members, but we’re growing!
The Ho Chi Minh Facebook group was also very busy, but seemed to attract infighting and bickering, probably due to the fact there are 28,000 members and something will always upset someone!
r/digitalnomad has close to 10,500 subscribers and is a halfway house of posts asking “how do i digital nomad?” and digital nomad blog self promotion.
The subreddit isn’t too traffic heavy, but regardless of what stage you are in there will generally be something of interest posted each week. e.g. I’ve just learned that theres a budding entrepreneur scene in the Ukraine!