It goes a long way back.

To start in 2009, when I was studying in Amsterdam I had the opportunity to study abroad. I studied and lived in Korea with my two Dutch friends, Hasse and Sam. Imagine never having been outside of Europe before and being dropped in the middle of nowhere in Seoul and having to figure things out. It was exciting and life changing. Back then I made a YouTube channel for electronic music, and YouTube paid me a few hundred dollars for the ads it ran on it. I knew I had to update my channel when I'd be in Korea, or it would die out. So I bought a small laptop that could barely render videos, and managed to keep my channel up to date and upload a new video every week. That was the first moment I was essentially working remotely away from home and saw it might work.

In 2012, I had almost graduated university with a Master's degree in Entrepreneurship. I just needed to write my master's thesis. Me and my friend Jim went to San Francisco and couchsurfed for months while we both finished off our thesis. I had rented out my room in Amsterdam, so I had to pack my stuff in boxes. When I came back from San Francisco, I hardly unpacked anything. And I realized I didn't need most of my material stuff and started reducing my possessions to what could fit in a backpack.

That same year, after graduating university, I went traveling again and I visited Saint Petersburg in Russia and was there for weeks, and on my laptop I worked on my YouTube channel and coding side projects. Those weeks I realized I didn't really need to be home in Amsterdam, but could pretty much go anywhere, as long as I had income.

In 2013, I did just that. I bought a MacBook and a backpack, packed my stuff, moved out and started traveling. I now had serious ad income from my YouTube channel, about $2,000 to $6,000/mo, so I could live from that. My first trip was almost a year long and I lived in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Ko Samui, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore and Hong Kong. It was a life changing year but mostly I discovered that it could potentially work, and probably for way more people than just me. Back then there were maybe 20 to 40 nomads in the hotspot of Chiang Mai. And outside of that, hardly anybody. Nomadism was an unknown micro niche with no real traction.

The first signal I was on to something, was that my super unknown travel blog, which I wrote mostly to keep my mom updated, started getting traction on Hacker News. At the end of 2013, I wrote a recap of my trip from the startup angle, and it went to the front page of Hacker News. That was new because before that digital nomadism wasn't popular so much under techies especially not on Hacker News.

After half a year in the Netherlands, I went on my second trip, I visited Ubud in Bali and there I wondered what more places would be suitable to live and work for people like me, and a site like that would probably make more people realize what I did, that you can probably work from anywhere.

I knew I needed fast internet, nice weather and low cost of living. So I made a spreadsheet, shared it on Twitter and people helped fill it in:

That became the basis for this site:

It went straight to the top of Hacker News, Product Hunt and hit Reddit's frontpage:

Since then it's been a crazy ride trying to keep up, both personally too and as a business. I used that early momentum to launch lots of things that I hoped would create something sustainable. I started organizing meetups, launched a jobs page for nomads called Nomad Jobs which later spun off Nomads.com as its own business called Remote OK, I created a Q&A forum and a Telegram chat group with thousands of people socializing on it, as well as a social network based on people's trips, and a dating app for remote workers.

The hard work has paid off and Nomads.com has since received 151,670,660 visits, and gets 432,283 monthly visits. It's become the dominant way for remote workers and nomads to find places to live and work and is the most popular site for digital nomads in the world.