Live and Work from anywhere on Earth in 2016

Digital Nomads — New standards

8 min readDec 11, 2015

Like many of you, my father had only a single profession throughout his life, where as I have had the opportunity to practice several. In just 25 years, I have worked freelance, on entrepreneurial projects and some typical hourly jobs.

I write this article remotely from Budapest where I am taking a break from my bike trip around the world. I stopped here to create and develop Startup House Budapest with my friend and co-founder Théau Ravier, after 8 months of being on the road.

Our society is ever-changing. The Digital Nomads of today vary from freelancers, entrepreneurs or teleworking employees who decide to live and work remotely, overcoming geographical constraints and embracing the nomadic lifestyle.

With the constant change of the factors defining the digital nomad lifestyle, we can see that grand improvements are being made and standards are rising. The changes allow individuals to greater enjoy their own freedom on movement.

It is all about allowing oneself to open up to the possibility of exploring the wold while simultaneously carrying out work related projects.

This lifestyle poses many logical questions, the main one being about living arrangements and housing.

Find accommodations anywhere on Earth

When traveling and working around the world, accommodation is a key criterion. As a digital nomad, our expectations are greater than the regular traveler. We require:

Fast and reliable WiFi
Easy access to all amenities
Environment conducive for work

In the past couple of years, I have tested several hosting solutions like hotels, hostels, Airbnb, bed & breakfast etc., that have met these criteria.

And with all the criteria being met, I realized that there was something even more important missing — a real community.

How many digital nomads end up feeling lonely in their hotel rooms or Airbnb apartment?
How many of them decide to go to a hostel 6 out of 7 days to meet people and end up going out most of the time, leading to a heavy hangover and delayed projects?

There are already many facebook groups, Meetup.com, Hashtag Nomads , etc. which offer digital nomads to meet each others everywhere around the world.

There are also Startup Houses, the next big thing.. They are designed to fulfill the requirements for digital nomads while creating a community of like-minded individulas who share and work together.

What is a Startup House?

This is a place, permanent or temporary, thematic or not, where digital nomads and startupers can come to live and work together, to share, learn, help each other, and ultimately improve each one’s productivity.

Each year, there are dozens of startup houses created throughout the world that allow thousands of digital nomads to come together in one community.

Other initiatives like Startup Basecamp, offer events for startups.

Other websites like Startup Retreats make it easy to find start up houses throughout the world. They offer Year-round Retreats for long-term stays and Pop-up Retreats for short-term ones.

You can also reference your own Startup House on their website.

Next Stage: Startup House World

When I decided to take a break in Budapest for one month during my trip around the world by bicycle, it was mainly to work on our respective projects with Théau Ravier. We needed a place to stay and our initial idea was to rent an apartment just for the two of us.

After some greater thought, we realized our experience would be a lot more meaningful if we were to share it with like-minded people. The kind of people who want to immerse themselves in a new culture and to learn about themselves while staying productive in their goals, projects and trade.

Without fully realizing, we built out first Startup House, from scratch. And we did it remotely; I was cycling in Finland and Theo was learning how to code at Le Wagon in Paris.

In the processes of piecing together the Startup House, we ran into several constraints and imponderables. But here I am, writing this article from out 200m square apartment which houses 15 like-minded entrepreneurs in the center of Budapest, for which I did not spend a penny for. This goes to show that we made it through the challenges and achieved our goal.

Startup House Budapest — The 3 main challenges

1) Finding the right apartment without knowing the exact number of participants

We used a easy hack for this. We decided to first sell spots in the house before even renting the apartment in order to have enough money to initiate the leasing. When we had enough participants (=enough funds), Théau decided to actually rent the greatest place he found on AirBnb.

Outcome : live feedback + no financial risk.

This allowed us to validate our dates and the overall concept of Startup House. Once the apartment was rented, we were able to push pictures and speed up the tempo of recruiting participants.

The house was completely full only 15 days after we pushed the project on our social media sites.

Theau and I shared the landing page and 2 Medium posts on Facebook (personal network + digital nomad’s groups) to achieve this quick of a response.

2) Recruiting the participants based on “cultural” criteria

When building this platform, we were striving to find people who were dedicated to their craft and wanted an immersive experience.

We didn’t care about their origin, background, qualifications, gender, age, etc.

We were striving to achieve a sense of community ; to live one month with highly motivated women and men, who want to push themselves, to work hard on their own projects, to share, to create, etc.

Théau Ravier took care of this part by contacting the first 50 leads we earned through the social media releases of the project website.

“If it doesn’t scale, who the fuck cares about this; we just need 15 people with whom we want to live for one month.”

3) The logistics

What do we do if the WiFi sucks?
Does the apartment look good?
When exactly will people arrive?

Only 3 questions, among a dozen, that we decided to stop asking ourselves until we physically arrived to the apartment. We came one week before all the others to be able to deal with any unexpected surprises in case they arose.

Fortunately, these were only minor problems and everything else went smoothly.

No life hack or specific technique used for this part. Luckily, Théau was patient, understanding and efficient in managing the logistics (e.g. buying 4 offices at the last minute when we realized that there would never be enough room for everyone, reorganize the whole apartment so that everyone has enough space etc).

From Startup House Budapest to Startup House World

Startup House Budapest is the beginning, and now our goal is to replicate it into a worldwide platform.

The idea was born from a simple question. Can we solve the next 3 challenges with a unique solution:

Provide digital nomads and startups a way to find and directly book their stay in a Startup House that corresponds perfectly to their needs (in terms of location, theme, participants)
Facilitate the creation, publication and promotion of temporary or permanent Startup Houses by the digital nomads, making the process as simple as renting an apartment on Airbnb
Combine these two solutions into one single platform

Validation and implementation

We decided to focus on the basics and steer clear from overthinking the platform, financing and other bullshit that restricts others from taking the leap from ‘wantreprenuers’ to entrepreneurs.

If the problem to be solved is the one we have identified then there should be people interested in using such a platform.

The first goal is to find individuals who are interested, before creating a product or building a landing page.

Pre-validation: Typeform + Slack

In just 48hours, we decided to set up a typeform to present the idea + retrieve contacts from interested individuals.

Then, using a script developed by a developer (with whom I share the apartment in Budapest) the people who filled the Typeform are automatically invited to the Slack community dedicated to the project.

In just 48 hours, more than 150 have already applied.

How does it work ?

The digital nomads who joined the Slack community are part of the beta-builders of the project.

The first phase is to share together around the main features to determine the outline, and then answer the questions of those who will later be interested in such a platform.

The 3 main features :

Automate and simplify the entire booking process and facilitate the communication between digital nomads and Startup Houses
Creating a community of startups houses, built by digital nomads themselves.
Valuing this creative process by allowing Startup Houses creators to monetize their business

Join the project

For now, the Slack community is open to anyone interested in the concept. You can ask your questions there and push your ideas to improve the product.

It will remain open until a team of builders is established to enable the development of the first version of the platform.

Interested?