Cody McKibben isn’t your ordinary freelancer. After he quit his job in 2007 to begin freelancing, McKibben took off from Northern California and headed for Asia. McKibben currently lives in Thailand and has built up a successful freelance business while exploring Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Bali.
McKibben is also one of the co-founders of Digital Nomad Academy, which provides resources and information about how to create a business and lifestyle that allows you to travel and work — not a bad proposition for many freelancers.
Q: How did you get your start as a freelancer? What came first, your interest in traveling or your interest in freelancing?
My interest in travel was probably sparked early on. In high school, my French professor was the first one who got me inspired about languages, culture, travel, and music, and actually he planted the first seeds of interest in Southeast Asia in particular too. Later, in college, I worked for the business school, and interacted a lot with the dean and several business professors who also ran their own small businesses. After literally 16 or 17 different jobs, and after reading a lot from really interesting, ambitious entrepreneurs online, I realized that I couldn’t continue to work in the traditional employment world, and I started to do my own freelancing work on the side—both because it was a better creative outlet for me and because it put me more in control of my career path.
I’d say my travel bug and my entrepreneurial spirit both grew organically on their own, separately, until I eventually realized, ‘Hey, I could combine these things and build a business that I can run solely online, that allows me to be anywhere, work with clients anywhere, and have the flexibility to set my own hours and basically travel and live anywhere I want!’
Q: How has your freelancing evolved since you started? Have your adventures moved your design work into a different shape than you expected?
Yes very much. I started out simply doing freelance projects for a lot of authors and small business owners — building websites and blogs, doing tech troubleshooting and maintenance, and so on, especially for a lot of clients in the Silicon Valley area, but also in Canada, Europe, and Australia. That was why it eventually clicked, that I was already working remotely with customers on 3 continents, so it really didn’t matter where I was, and I wasn’t tied down to any one particular location.
And, all along, I was also using those same skills to create my own websites just for the fun of it. For the longest time blogging didn’t earn me any money, I just did a lot of writing simply because I was passionate about sharing my interests, my travels, and my philosophy. But eventually things started to change—I started to spend a lot more time solely working on projects that really got me inspired, focusing much more just on organizations who had causes I cared about, partnering to help out friends here and there, and eventually I dedicated myself to creating my own projects, and now, I really don’t do very much client work at all anymore.
This year I’m really spending most of my time as a teacher really, sharing my knowledge with a bunch of really cool, ambitious students who want to create similar online businesses and be able to live and work anywhere. It’s really fun, it’s completely aligned with who I am and what I stand for, and it gets me fired up. When you’re a freelancer, there is no reason you can’t pour the same energy, skills, and time into building your own projects as opposed to client projects.
Q: Can you describe a day in your life? How do you get your work done in exotic locations like Thailand?
Well there are a lot of tricks to remaining productive and focusing on your work when it’s necessary. But, generally if you can work from home, if you’re someone who has the drive to work for yourself or build a business of your own, then you’re not going to have any more trouble working from abroad.
A day in my life is hard to pin down because part of what I enjoy about the lifestyle it allows me is the flexibility, the freedom to work when my energy levels are up, or to randomly take a day off if I want to go climb a mountain or something, or to travel to another country for a week or a weekend, whether it’s for a conference or a romantic getaway. But, yes for the last six months or so I’ve been mostly living in the south of Thailand, in a small town near the beach. I’ve moved around a lot and found a place that I really enjoy, where I’m relaxed and can have a great lifestyle. But most days I wake naturally around 10 or 11am, I make breakfast or sometimes go out for a nice English breakfast with my girlfriend if she’s not working, typically work 4-8 hours a day, and frequently go for a nice dinner out or meet up with friends for a drink to get in some fun and social time.
Q: How do you make the money aspects of living and working in different countries work?
I still currently pay normal self-employed income taxes back home in the US. Some countries have certain requirements or rules for working there or how long you can stay depending on your personal situation, and I’m not a lawyer so it’s up to you to go find those things out for yourself.
On the bright side, for me I tend to travel very slowly, I live for several months at a time in each given place, and that style of travel is actually surprisingly cheaper than most people imagine. Especially in somewhere like Asia or South America, you can actually live a high standard of living for significantly cheaper than usual back in the US or Europe, for example. So that can actually be a huge advantage for many folks who travel and work.
Q: Are there any tools or techniques that make running a freelance business from abroad easier for you?
Well, you can see most of my nomadic toolbox on my site, but really it just comes down to a few things most of the time: my laptop, a decent internet connection, some web development tools, and the software I use to collaborate virtually with my team: things like Skype, Google Docs, DropBox, BaseCamp and so on.
Q: What would you recommend for someone interested in becoming a digital nomad (as a freelancer)? Where should they start?
Dig into all the free material available online. There is actually a really large, growing community of digital nomads, location independent professionals and virtual entrepreneurs online, many of whom are very helpful and share great information and advice. If you’re a freelancer already, then you’re in an ideal position to easily start traveling—because for the most part your job is most likely already online and so your biggest hurdle will simply be a mindset change you need to make, and maybe get your finances in order and get your business organized so you can easily travel with things.
Of course, I’m going to recommend you come check out Digital Nomad Academy — an online community and business course that two friends and I built to share our experience, the knowledge, resources, and network we’ve accumulated over the last several years on our own path to building these location-independent businesses. But I will say, it’s only for people who know they want to be living this kind of lifestyle in a year or two down the road. It’s a big commitment—but if you’re motivated and willing to put in the effort to build a location independent lifestyle for yourself, and you need the extra guidance and direct mentorship from a community of experienced, successful folks who have done it, then it could be a great resource for you.
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