Colin Burns – Introduction
Hello, I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce myself. My name is Colin Burns and I have recently taken over running the NuNomad.com website from Carmen and Ricardo.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for all the amazing work that they have done on this website and on building a resource and community to help people achieve location independence. They have truly created a great resource and I hope that my endeavours and enthusiasm for being apart of this community will help us to build a truly great resource for everyone whether you are looking to work from anywhere in the world or if you are already on the road and looking for a community to to help support your endeavours.
My background
I don’t know a lot of you guys so I thought I would spend a little bit of time in this blog post telling you a little about myself, what makes me want to get involved with nunomad.com and what makes me qualified to write anything about digital nomadism and location independence.
This very second I am sitting in a (cheap) hotel on the outskirts of London, tomorrow I will be somewhere in the south of England and next Tuesday we’ll be starting our adventure through Eastern Europe. (Yep, in the middle of winter may not have been one of our smartest ideas, but we are suckers for a cheap airfare). So here we are in London, showing the kids the sights and spending a lot of time as a family.
In the past 2 years we have backpacked through Bali, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and spent 5 months driving around East & Southern Australia. All of this has been done while earning enough money to feed, clothe, educate and fly around 4 people (albeit two of those are rather small). So given that fact that I have been able to combine work and a travel lifestyle I think I am able to help when it comes to talking about being able to work from anywhere.
The family aspect of digital nomadism may not be of much interest to you and I promise that this website will not become a location for me to write about how cool my family is and how excited I was when my son, Noah lost his first tooth or the pride I feel when my daughter Hayley looks up at me with those big blue eyes. We have a website for that here and we even have a website for long-term travelling families here so I promise you I won’t be turning this website into a website devoted to long-term family nomadism.
By profession I am a Web Developer. I have been for the past 10 years. In Australia I owned a small web design firm which I sold/gave away in 2008. After working for a mid-sized firm for 16 months I decided to leave and go my own way again. Not long after this I finally convinced my wife that digital nomadism was the way forward for us and since that time we haven’t looked back.
Now some of you might think, well duh, anyone who has web development skills can be a digital nomad. Not true! And I can say this emphatically. Having a skill set that allows you to be mobile is only one of the many challenges you will face when you choose to become a digital nomad. For example, how does one get new work, what rates should you charge, how do you position yourself in the market? Do you want to work through online job boards like elance.com, odesk.com etc or do you build your own network to source work. Both methods have their pros and cons. These are some of the things that we can all help each other with.
Like any freelance work, digital nomadism requires you to think like a business person. Anyone can do it and I hope that through this website we can help equip you with the skills and information that you need to become truly mobile (if you are not already).
The future???
I have some pretty big plans for nunomad.com but before I start doing the things I want, I thought I would take the time to ask you all to help me come up with some ideas for the site. As I said I have the skill set that will allow me to transform the nunomad.com website into exactly what this community needs and wants.
So I would like to ask you to share your thoughts on what direction you would like to see this website go in. What type of articles, what type of resources, what type of functionalities would you like to be a part of nunomad.com.
One of the things I would like to encourage is the building of our community through our Facebook Group. I hope to foster an environment of sharing and support for others who are new to digital nomadism or are even on the road already and just want a community to be a part of to share in their successes or to help during the harder times.
What’s next?
I would like to start the discussion in our Facebook group (but I am still happy to hear any comments through the comments here). I will start the conversation by asking a few questions and hopefully everyone’s feedback will help us get to a point where we can all move forward together. I would really appreciate your honest feedback about the different parts of the website, how you use or don’t use particular parts of the website and generally any thoughts on how you think we can improve.
My sincere aim in this transition is complete transparency. I want you at all times to know where you stand and what the future direction of the site will be. I can’t promise that every suggestion will be carried out, but I can assure you that every suggestion/criticism will be heard and taken on board. Most of the communication surrounding the transition will be done in the Facebook Group so please head on over and join in.
I’m really looking forward to meeting a whole new group of people and hopefully together we can create a resource that will help the ever growing community of digital nomads.
All the best,
Colin
