TLDR;

Today I’m unveiling a project I’ve been working on for the past few months: a new podcast designed to demystify nomadic, location-independent work and make it more accessible. My goal is to help 100 people get “unstuck” by helping them make this transformative lifestyle change. You only get one chance with a podcast launch and I would love to break into the iTunes “New & Noteworthy” section for Places & Travel. Every single download & review helps towards this cause. If you support what I’m doing please take 30 sec now and download and subscribe to my podcast on iTunes. You can find video episodes and other goodies on NomadPodcast.com.

The Bigger Picture and Backstory

This effort began in December 2017 when I read an editorial piece on the New York times that talked about The Lost Einsteins. That article proposed that society today is deprived of an unknowable number of life-changing inventions by would-have-been Einsteins. They theorize that these young future potential contributors grow up without access to the environment and opportunities that would have been the catalyst for them to flourish due to living in poor socioeconomic status households.

This article resonated with me but for a different reason. While I agree with the author’s premise and suspect that indeed this is true and happening I hypothesize that the same phenomenon is at work within adults of all walks regardless of socioeconomic status. I believe there are a non-trivial number of privileged adults with all the trappings that came with a graduate education who went through a plinko board of choices in the education system and wound up winnowed into a career that doesn’t allow for the optimal expression of their talents. It’s debatable to what degree this is happening but unarguably this is true for some percentage of adults and it gets only more difficult over time to extract yourself from this rut. We find ourselves in veritable doldrums at points in our lives and while revamping the current education system to address the root cause and get more of the right people in the right roles out of the gate is a longer-arc massive undertaking, I believe there is a simple, immediate antidote for this issue and I want to try and make this more accessible to people in this situation.

Nomadic working travel has been instrumental in awakening me from this adult slumber. I won’t go into my personal story (if you want to read details Remote Year covered it well in this piece) but basically RY was a defibrillator that shocked me back to life, served as a gateway drug to nomadic working travel and ejected me from a personal and professional rut.

Why these three resources?

I spent three months living and working in Mexico, City last winter and had the opportunity to get to know a bunch of the admissions team for Remote Year. I was sitting within earshot and overheard numerous calls with aspiring digital nomads and while I only heard one side of the conversation, I got a high-concentration dose of Customer Discovery insights into the concerns and objections of aspirational nomads who wanted to do this type of working travel program.

I decided over Christmas break to develop a simple eCourse that would package up everything I had learned from my 1.5yrs of location-independent work at that point and give people a resource to help them more confidently make the leap. That project mushroomed into a significant undertaking. The deeper I got into developing the curriculum for that effort the more I wanted to apply what I knew of automation and software to turn it into a personalized coaching system that would not just be a static brochure but a living, interactive preparation tool. I spent most of my Christmas break developing content, gamification, an interactive checklist and automations to create the resource I wished I had going into Remote Year. I launched Nomad Prep a few weeks later with little fanfare and promptly realized I had committed the age-old entrepreneurial mistake of building a product before building an audience. That course continues to receive a trickle of students each week but I realized there needs to be a better way of reaching more aspiring nomads.

Nomad Bloggers (at the time RemoteYearBlogs.com but now changed due to trademark) was a project I had started in our first month of Remote Year originally intended to be a way of aggregating the blog posts from the bloggers in our group. I had modified it to support syndicating posts from other groups and it was growing in traffic. I rebranded it with the Nomad label, sold RemoteYearBlogs.com to Remote Year and used that cash to hire a developer from Upwork to add “Reddit-like” voting functionality and make the blog aggregator more sticky. While this seemed like a promising potential source of aspiring nomads it didn’t move the needle traffic-wise for Nomad Prep.

Shortly after I did a few interviews with prospective clients for Remote Year (they call them “Premotes”) and while the sessions were super-helpful, that approach unfortunately doesn’t scale. It led me to realize though that face-to-face video interaction captured and shared provide a rich way to ask and answer questions. I got the idea in my head that there’s room to do a podcast wherein I interview successful nomads, founders of travel programs and domain experts on subjects that could help educate folks on how to be better at working and living abroad. As with everything, it ended up taking 3x as long as expected working nights to cobble this together but I’m proud today to launch what I believe is the missing piece of the distribution puzzle here. I present to you NomadPodcast.com, the first platform of its kind for sharing stories that can help current and aspiring Nomads.

I’ll spare you the gory details of everything it does but it showcases interviews in HD video via YouTube, is mobile-friendly, has audio-only versions syndicated across all major podcast platforms and each episode includes a bunch of supporting elements like transcript, photos, links, show notes and the ability to ask the guest questions via text comments as well as recording a video via your webcam. I’m hopeful that this will become a resource that helps current nomads be more excellent and helps prospective nomads confidently take the leap to trying this lifestyle and in so doing will have the same transformative, awakening effect that nomadic travel has had on me. If it helps even one or two people have an adventure abroad they otherwise wouldn’t have had that revitalizes them or even awakens the next slumbering adult Einstein then I would find that hugely rewarding.

I have interviews at varying stages of the production cycle now with a number of stellar guests. If you’re onboard with this cause there’s nothing to buy here nor donations to make, just subscribe to the podcast via your favorite platform using the links below and tell a friend who could benefit from it. Thanks for your support.
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