The ICBM Economy- global competition and the missile shield of travel

The world is a battleground of ideas- anyone, anywhere can launch a first draft of most ideas within a couple of weeks, leveraging years of work on a pay per usage basis. Ideas don’t occur in a vacuum, and when the idea to launch time window is measured in weeks instead of years, you damn well better have a better environment for idea generation than your competition.

We’ve gone from a world of cavalry charges to one of ICBM strikes- when the next guy’s missiles are arcing over the Arctic you better have yours firing back, and fast.

Travel as a missile shield.

Spreadsong’s a new company and there’s a million things that have to be done to keep revenue growing in the right direction. It means product launches, major updates, major initiatives, and just generally killing it across the board- it means having awesome ideas and executing better than anyone else. Because of this, I work a ton- Spreadsong’s growing fast, we have a lot of customers, there are support needs, emails to answer, strategies to execute on, ideas to test, new things to try. And that’s awesome! I’ve been working my ass off to make that sentence a reality for years, and it’s incredible satisfying to see it come true.

I’m not a Four Hour Work Week man, if but for the simple reason that I like what I do. However, in spending huge swathes of time building, it’s also easy to get lost in the swirling tide of crisis. It’s easy to have each day a Donnie Darko like line from bed to shower to breakfast to office to bed once more. That sucks. It’s no way to live, and definitely no way to come up with great ideas.

So, the question is, how do you come up with better ideas than the next guy? And, not just the next guy, but an entire planet? How do you come up with profitable ideas and then execute relentlessly on them?

Travel.

By being more aware, more interested, more engaged and excited about the day to day, it gets easier to create. And that’s what making money is about now- creation. Creating something new, whether derivative or original- creation. It’s being surrounded by other language, the moment to moment crush of the new- the combination makes it easier to be focused on the moment.

That brings us to serendipity- in being more aware, more opportunity comes. I’ve found it to be universally true while traveling, and friends who live abroad have found the same to totally true. It’s really all over the place- talking to people in cafes who don’t speak a lot of English I get enormously helpful feedback on how we phrase stuff, making for a more usable app. And just that act, getting to know people from other countries, in another country, opens up a huge swathe of opportunity.

An anecdote.

Just as I came in to the cafe I’m writing this from- one of the girls who works here waved and brought over a friend of hers. They had just been talking about what we’re doing, since I come in pretty regularly- as we all talked, her friend actually brought up something about the way book lists are distributed that I’d never even considered.

It had huge implications for the future. A random conversation with a Hungarian art student, but one with far-reaching implications. Will it turn into something big? I think so, because it’s the kind of small occurance that points to a broader, large-scale occurence. And it’s easy to test! So, as we move forward, as we launch our next few products, we have more information to act on, and better ideas to execute upon- we’ll be there before anyone else, because of a random serendipitous experience.

Travel is our missile shield- what’s yours?

Bootstrapping Abroad: why we do it and why it's awesome

Bootstrapping abroad, a wanderlust in two acts. Ira Glass eat your heart out.

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about travel and business, and not a lot of real hard info. It’s a bit of an out there thing, I guess- start your business from Argentina for the low, low price of $1,000 a month! Call today, supplies are limited! There’s a lot of mythologizing around travel, and a lot of dreams. The latter is especially dangerous, especially for folks who work on their laptops- I think most of us love the idea of living in a tropical paradise, working from the beach and creating to the sounds of surf sweeping up onto the sand.

So what’s it really like?

I’ve now worked for at least three months from three places internationally- Buenos Aires, Koh Tao, and Budapest.

Whenever the the topic of working abroad comes up, there’s usually a list of concerns everyone has in the back of their mind. Here’s the bottom line: everything is fixable with money, and if you managed to luck out by having savings in a strong currency, it won’t cost much. It costs less each month to work on the tropical island of Koh Tao, Thailand than it does to work in San Francisco, Austin, Boulder, or New York. I won’t count Seattle because the weather sucks and it’s always overcast, so whatever. Though it’s also true for Seattle. Not that I’m counting Seattle.

Anyways.

In general, if you choose to move on over to an emerging market like Argentina or Thailand, you can count on costs being cut by two thirds for an equivalent lifestyle to what you might have in San Francisco or New York- in reality, though, if you cut to a third you’ll be tempted to spend more, go out a bit more, and drink a bit more- you’ll really wind up with a net halving.

Most expats I know don’t live an equivalent lifestyle to what they had in the States, they live it up a bit in their apartment and their day to day life. Not a lot, but a little bit in every area across the board. So, while you can definitely cut costs to a third or a quarter, most wind up cutting by a half and improving their quality of life.

So, live better life, pay less money, double your runway! Fucking score, eh? A lot of this depends on what kind of lifestyle you want- if your business is selling products on the internet to consumers, without a enterprise or B2B aspect that requires you be able to go pitch the product in person, there’s an enormous degree of flexibility in the day to day life you can craft for yourself and your company.

Life in every place is different, there’s no broad ‘bootstrap abroad’ conclusion- if you want to live on the beach, give it a go! Koh Tao was beautiful but the environment didn’t really jell for me- there’s a lot of great people living there, but it’s like living in DisneyLand- everyone is there to forget about their troubles for a week, then return to their soulcrushing job at a big multinational.

You meet a lot of folks who have checked out in a lot of respects- working real estate, one day decide that they’re sick and tired of it, move to Koh Tao, get a job as a scuba instructor, and spend every day teaching people to surf and swimming through some of the most gorgeous reefs you’ve ever seen in your life.

Amazing gig! But not exactly the ideal atmosphere for building a new company. For me, it wasn’t a good fit- but for someone else it might be perfect. The fact is, there’s tons of amazing, beautiful emerging markets that would be great to live in- I can’t recommend Buenos Aires enough, for instance.

For me, the biggest benefit is intangible- when you live in one place for years, it starts to feel a bit stale. You drive on autopilot, you walk around without really seeing the beauty around you- normalcy. And normalcy is stifling, and uncreative. When I travel, everything is new- obvious, right? But if everything is new, you always have to be a bit more on your game, a little more aware, and a little more in the moment. It’s creative, and in its moment to moment creativity, there’s a moment to moment focus that makes starting a business feel like a more natural outgrowth… of lifestyle.

And that’s what it’s about- lifestyle. Imagine working your ass off for three years starting a business only to wind up having to commute 40 minutes into a downtown highrise every day. What’s the point? Transitioning from one high rise office to a slightly larger high rise office, albeit that you happen to cast a vote on a board in favor of?

Having a business is art, and I don’t care how off the wall that might sound. A corporation is a political entity- it brings together people to make shit happen, just like a nation-state does, except on a smaller scale, and sans F22’s. When you start a business you’re creating a new organization, and a new lifestyle- you have the opportunity to create something new in the world not just in terms of product, but in terms of the day to day of each and every employee. So create!

If you want to build not just a product but an organization, go where you’re most creative, go where you have the best shot at starting something new. Make something people want, to be sure, but put yourself in a position with the cards stacked in your favor. Living somewhere where you’re more creative on a day to day basis, moving somewhere you have a higher quality of life, moving somewhere where costs are a third- these are all good things. These are all amazing things. And, at the very least, these are all things worth trying- so book your ticket and give bootstrapping abroad a go!