I want to start a group of nomads that wander around the U.S. and hopefully canada and south america as well. No cars, no money needed, just each other and a family bond. Im VERY serious, I just need 1 other person to start it with, ideally its open to anyome from anywhere tho

I am 30 year old man from the UK and I recently got made redundant from my 5 year job. I have decided to move out of my flat and move in with family temporarily and use the redundancy payout to leave the UK at the end of October. I’m going to be travelling full time no flights (when possible) overland starting with a trip through India/Nepal (trip that was booked and paid before I knew of the redundancy) before flying of to Indonesia and travelling up bali, Java and Sumatra before getting the ferry to Malaysia. This is me making a huge gamble on having a more nomadic lifestyle and I am really excited but also incredibly nervous if anybody has any general advice (places to see, budgets, income opportunities) please feel free to share.

Is that pretty much what it is for nomads as far as making money. If you dont have a youtu.be or remote job.

I'm curious to see if I'm as unique or alone as I assume I surely must be. Anyone here "homeless by choice", a stealth (tent or tarp) camper, solo, age 50 or older with autism, mental illness, POTs, and shit joints like me?

Hey everyone!

I’m currently conducting an undergraduate academic study (University of Szeged) on digital nomad mobility, community connections, and why some nomads decide to settle down.

If you have 8–10 minutes while having your coffee, I’d be super grateful if you could fill out my short survey (active and former nomads are both welcome!):

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdReGzxMiS_pb7TwuVFV2ASeDR8WsvIsVb-8bsn-cMxSjDO9g/viewform?usp=header

Thanks a lot for helping out a fellow student/researcher! ☕💻

In 2014, Pieter Levels set himself a challenge to launch 12 startups in 12 months. His aim was to force himself to finish and launch projects rather than endlessly polish them.

A decade later, Greg Isenberg published a guide entitled “Build an AI Startup in 3 Hours with < $500.” Three hours felt unrealistic, but it made me wonder how quickly I could create something useful. Not just a prototype, but a web product that other people could use.

I gave myself a day. The result was NameClicked.com.

Start with a problem you have

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. - Paul Graham

This year I’ve built six products under the Incyworks startup umbrella. Each time I start one, I face the same, somewhat challenging, question: What should I call it?

A good name has to be memorable, easy to say and spell and have a suitable domain available. It should also avoid conflicts with existing businesses and potential trademark problems. Typically, I’d open half a dozen browser tabs and start checking things manually. That seemed like a product opportunity.

The idea coalesced into: describe what you’re building, generate or enter some possible names, and have the app assess them. Not just a list of suggestions, but an explanation of which names are stronger, why and what still needs checking. That was enough to start.

The first thing I built was the specification

Plans are nothing; planning is everything. - Dwight D. Eisenhower

The first part of the build didn’t happen at a desk. I was out walking so I opened ChatGPT in voice mode and asked it to interview me about the idea. One question at a time: who was the product for, what should it do, what would a useful result look like and what could be left out?

Walking turned out to be an effective way to think. I wasn’t distracted by implementation details and the back-and-forth forced me to make decisions rather than leave everything open.

By the time I got home, the rough idea had become a reasonably detailed specification. I dropped it into Claude Code and asked it to build the app.

Build the smallest useful version

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. - C. Northcote Parkinson

One of the easiest ways to avoid finishing a product is to start designing the perfect version: database schemas, user journeys, pricing tiers, edge cases and a roadmap stretching months into the future. All useful things, but they can create the reassuring feeling of progress without confronting the awkward question: Does anyone want this?

For NameClicked, I concentrated on one useful sequence. Describe your product, generate or enter some names, assess them and display the results. Everything else could wait.

Having only a day made decisions surprisingly easy. Each additional feature had to answer one question: Does this need to exist before somebody can use the product?

There’s a big difference between incomplete and unusable. I wasn’t trying to finish NameClicked in a day. I was trying to make it useful. A deadline turns perfectionism into prioritisation.

AI has changed what building means

The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed. - William Gibson

The interesting part wasn’t that I spent a day frantically coding. I didn’t. I spent most of it making decisions.

Claude Code handled much of the implementation, Supabase provided the database and Vercel handled deployment. I also reused patterns from my other products. My role felt less like programmer and more like product manager, designer, tester and slightly irritating customer.

I’d describe something, Claude would build it, I’d try it, something would feel wrong and we’d change it. Then repeat. The bottleneck wasn’t typing code. It was deciding what the product should do.

That’s an important shift. AI can make producing software dramatically faster, but somebody still has to decide what’s worth producing.

“Built in a day” doesn’t mean built in a day

Chance favours the prepared mind. - Louis Pasteur

There’s a slight cheat here. NameClicked was built in a day, but it rests on decades of experience.

I’ve spent years working with software, pricing and product development. More recently, I’ve built several small web products, giving me a familiar technology stack and reusable patterns. AI accelerates all of that, but doesn’t replace it.

Watching a pianist play a piece in three minutes doesn’t mean it took three minutes to learn. In the same way, building a product quickly doesn’t mean the knowledge behind it appeared that morning.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about AI development isn’t that experience matters less. It’s that experience suddenly has much more leverage.

What could you build in a day?

The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else. - Eric Ries

By the end of the day, NameClicked existed. But that wasn’t really the objective. The objective was to reach more interesting questions. Will people use it? Do they agree with its assessments? What confuses them? Would anybody pay for a more detailed report?

Those questions are easier to answer when there’s something real to try. I don’t think every business should be built in three hours or even a day. But there’s something powerful about asking: What would this look like if I had to launch it tomorrow?

AI hasn’t removed the challenge of finding something people want. It’s dramatically reduced the cost of finding out.

One day, one idea, one live product. Now the interesting bit starts.

What could you build in a day? I’d love to hear what you’d try.

Want more?

NameClicked.com app to help choose a product name by Phil Martin

How to Build a Minimum Viable Product post by Phil Martin

How Less Makes Us Creative post by Phil Martin

A day might not be enough to build a business. But it might be enough to discover whether you’ve got the beginnings of one.

Have fun.

Phil…

I made an iOS app where you rank places you've been head-to-head ("Lisbon or Mexico City?") and it builds your personal ranking of every city. It's live, and almost 1000 travelers have ranked ~11000 trips so far, but it's mostly used for normal travel. I travel like many of you do, a few days to a few weeks per city, so I want to make it actually useful for nomads.

would you want to log about each place? Things I'm considering:
How long you stayed and why you left
Wi-Fi and coworking quality
Cost of living vs what you expected
Community: easy to meet people or lonely?
Would you go back for a month, or just visit?
Time zone pain for your work

And a few questions:
What would make you actually keep a log like this?
What do you wish you'd known before moving somewhere?

I’m not sure if this post is violating any rules.

Hey everyone! 😊
I'm (31F) looking for a travel filmmaker who would like to build a long-term creative and travel project with me.

I'm a very curious person, passionate about meeting people and having meaningful conversations. I have degrees in both software engineering and anthropology, and I'm particularly fascinated by relationships, intimacy, sexuality, identity, culture, social life, and the different ways people make sense of their lives and connect with one another.

When I travel, I like to travel slowly. I don't enjoy rushing from one place to another just to tick things off a list. I like having enough time to actually settle into an environment, observe, wander, get a feel for a place and connect with the people who live there. I'm very conscious that when I travel, I'm entering someone else's home, community and culture, so I do that with the utmost humility, curiosity and respect. I want to understand rather than assume, listen rather than impose, and always be mindful of how I show up in the spaces and communities I enter. For me, travel is much more about connection and understanding than simply consuming destinations.

I'm very comfortable talking to people and being on camera. I love asking questions, hearing people's stories and getting to know what lies beneath the surface of someone's life. I'd bring the on-camera side, interviewing, research, storytelling ideas. What I'm not particularly good at, or passionate about, is being behind the camera 😂

So I'm looking for someone who genuinely loves filmmaking, documentaries and visual storytelling, but who also has a strong desire to travel, explore and meet people. Ideally, filming and visual storytelling would be one of your strengths, while we'd develop the creative direction and ideas together.

I'm imagining something somewhere between travel documentary, conversational/interview content and a personal documentary series. I'd like to focus less on the places themselves and more on the people we meet, the stories they tell, how they experience their lives, how they connect with one another, and the conversations that happen along the way.

I'd love to create something that brings in new perspectives and experiences, and sometimes even challenges assumptions. Ultimately, the people and their stories would be at the heart of the project.

The plan would be to publish primarily on YouTube and hopefully build something sustainable around it. I'd love for this to eventually become something we can both make a living from, but I also want to be completely transparent that there is no guarantee that it will work out.

I know this might sound crazy to a lot of people. I'm essentially looking for the small percentage of people who hear "let's build something from scratch, travel, create, experiment and see where it takes us" and think, "Honestly... why not?"

Maybe it is crazy. But I've had this idea and this passion in my head for a long time, and I'm honestly just tired of having something I care about so much and not doing anything with it. So I've decided that I'm going to give it a real shot this time and see where it takes me.

This is currently an unpaid project. And I completely understand why that wouldn't make sense for someone who is already an established filmmaker with a big career, a strong professional trajectory and lots of paid opportunities. I'm not expecting someone like that to suddenly join an unpaid project.

I'm not looking for someone to work for me. I'm looking for someone to work with me. I want to find a person who is excited by the idea itself, who wants to build something together from the beginning, bring their own ideas and take an equal creative stake in what we create.

Ideally, we'd become friends along the way too. Obviously, I don't expect that to happen automatically, but if we're going to travel, create and spend a lot of time together, I'd love for this to be a genuine human connection as well as a creative one.

Because of that, I'd ideally be looking for someone who already has some kind of stable or flexible income that allows them to support themselves while travelling. I currently work remotely/part-time alongside travelling and use that to sustain myself while I travel.

I completely understand that an unpaid project won't work for everyone, and that's absolutely fine. I'm just looking for someone who is in a position to explore this despite the uncertainty because they're genuinely passionate about filmmaking, storytelling and the idea of building something from the ground up.

Something that's particularly important to me is that this wouldn't be a situation where one person is simply "the filmmaker" working for someone else. I'd want us to be genuine creative partners. We'd have equal decision-making power, bring our own ideas and creative direction, and both have a real stake in what we create. If the project eventually generates income, we'd share the gains equally. I'd also like everything to be fair on a practical level. For example, if we're travelling somewhere and renting accommodation, I'd like to split the costs fairly and essentially operate as a team.

I'm also looking for someone who genuinely enjoys the idea of a more flexible, nomadic lifestyle and has relatively few commitments tying them to one particular place. I don't mean that we'd have to travel together constantly or be away for months and months at a time. Sometimes a project could mean travelling together for two weeks, sometimes a month, sometimes three months - it really depends on the project, the place and what makes sense at the time. The important thing to me is having the freedom and flexibility to do that when an opportunity comes up, rather than needing to be in one place all year.

You might have your own work, projects or income alongside this, as I do. I'm not looking for someone who has to make this their entire life. I'm looking for someone who has enough freedom and flexibility to occasionally pack a bag, go somewhere for a while, create something together, and then return to their own life if that's what makes sense. I have a partner myself, and he's also pursuing his own creative projects and things he's involved in, so I completely understand the importance of having your own life alongside this.

I'd love to find someone who feels excited by freedom, adventure and the possibility of building a life that leaves room for travel and creative work, rather than someone whose circumstances make that kind of spontaneity very difficult.

I'm ideally looking for someone around 29–37 who loves being behind the camera, is curious about people, enjoys spontaneous and unscripted situations, has their own creative ambitions, and has enough flexibility to make occasional longer trips possible.

Gender doesn't matter to me at all. Personality, compatibility, creative chemistry and shared interests are much more important.

I'm also new to this myself. This would be the first time I've ever built a project like this, so I'm not coming into it with years of experience in filmmaking or running a YouTube channel. At the same time, I have a lot of confidence in the idea and in what we could create together, and I'm genuinely excited to learn by doing. I'm also still very much at the early stage of developing the project, which means I'd love to find someone who has their own ideas and wants to shape it with me. I'm not looking for someone to simply execute my vision but I'd like to shape the project together instead.

Ideally, we'd meet first, get to know each other, see if we click, and take it from there. I'd obviously want to make sure we genuinely get along and enjoy working together before committing to travelling together.

If this sounds like something you'd like to build, please send me a DM! I'd love to hear from you. 😊

EDIT: Oh, and if this isn't the best place to post this, I apologise! I would really appreciate any guidance on where else I could post it. Thanks so much!

TL;DR: I'm (31F) looking for a travel filmmaker to become an equal creative partner in a long-term documentary project focused on people, stories, culture and human connection. I'm looking for someone who loves filming and wants to build something from scratch with me, rather than work for me, so it's currently unpaid but we'd share creative decisions and any future income equally. I'm not looking for a permanent travel partner - trips could be anywhere from 2 weeks to a few months, and ideally you'd have the freedom/flexibility and relatively few commitments to make that possible. I'm new to this too, so I'm not looking for an established filmmaker, but someone curious, creative and excited to take a chance on building something together.

I had so much planning and structure in my life, I went to uni, had a prosperous career in pharma and had a long term partner - I should have been happy. But to be honest, I was miserable.

Now I want the opposite. I have an overwhelming urge to just go live and work in the woods, on a farm, or in the arctic - anywhere slow, real and with natural beauty. If anyone needs a basic helper, preferably not in the U.K., give me a shout (I’m very aware how much of a long shot this is and how crazy it sounds).

What are people like here? Is it mostly retirees or nomads?

I work in the oilfield in the Gulf of America. I am an engineer on 240ft OSV. I work a 28/14 rotation. When I am not on the boat, starting on or before Jan 1, I will be putting my stuff in storage and travel to see my kids more in Florida, where I currently reside and see my girlfriend in Massachusetts. Driving in the south amd flying up north. Now I stay with her, but we do outdoor stuff also. She even flies down to Louisiana or Florida and goes with me to see my kids and gonto Disney and other places. Anyone else live like this. Thank you, Aaron

A few years ago, “Uber for X” startups seemed to be spawning daily. Uber for laundry. Uber for dog walking. Uber for massages. Uber for private jets.

The logic seemed compelling. Uber was one of the fastest-growing startups in the world. Investors loved it, customers understood the model and the formula appeared transferable. So founders copied it.

But an overlooked factor was at work. These founders weren’t necessarily responding to customers demanding an Uber for laundry or dog walking. Often, they were responding to Uber’s success. Investors wanted to find the next Uber so founders started building businesses that looked like Uber. Other investors saw those bets being made and became interested too.

From the outside, it looked as though lots of founders had independently spotted the same opportunity. In reality, many were taking their cues from one another.

Philosopher René Girard called this phenomenon mimetic desire.

Girard argued that we rarely decide what we want by ourselves. Instead, we look at other people, notice what they value and begin to value it ourselves. We don’t just copy behaviour; we copy desire.

That idea applies to startups.

1. We copy desire

Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. - René Girard

Walk down an unfamiliar street looking for somewhere to eat and two neighbouring restaurants present themselves. One has three empty tables in the window. The other is full and has two people waiting outside.

Without seeing a menu, most of us have already formed an opinion about which is probably better.

The queue is not merely an inconvenience. It is information. Other people have chosen this place and their choice affects ours.

Products work the same way. When somebody we respect adopts a new product, we pay attention. When several people like us use it, the decision becomes easier. Something can move from unusual to almost inevitable.

This is why early customers matter so much. Our first ten customers don’t just provide revenue or feedback. They provide evidence to customers from eleven to one hundred that this is something people like them use.

2. Competition makes us similar

Competition is for losers. - Peter Thiel

We normally imagine competition encouraging differentiation. Often it does the opposite.

One company launches a feature so its competitor adds it. One changes pricing so everyone reviews theirs. One starts talking about “AI agents” and soon every homepage in the category seems to mention them.

Competitors watch one another so closely that they become mirror images.

I saw plenty of this during 40 years in large companies. Strategy meetings regularly involved questions such as: What are our competitors doing? What are they charging? What have they launched?

These were sensible questions, but there was always a danger. Spend too much time looking sideways and the objective quietly changes from solve the customer’s problem to keep up with the competition.

For a startup, being slightly better than five similar competitors may be much harder than finding a different game to play.

3. Copy from somewhere else

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. - T. S. Eliot

Avoiding mimetic competition doesn’t mean refusing to copy. Quite the opposite.

One of the best ways to create something distinctive is to borrow from somewhere our competitors aren’t looking.

A software company can learn engagement from games. A professional service can learn hospitality from hotels. A productivity app can learn community building from Lego.

I’ve found myself doing this with Daily View, the simple day calendar I’m building for older people. I’m not trying to invent a new kind of calendar. The interesting part is borrowing familiar ideas from calendars, information displays and simple consumer products then asking how they need to change for an older person looking at a screen across a room.

The useful inspiration often comes from outside the category rather than from products labelled as competitors.

Most innovation works like this. Existing ideas are moved, combined or applied somewhere unexpected.

Instead of asking, “What are our competitors doing?”, it may be more useful to ask: Who outside our industry has already solved a similar problem?

4. Make desire visible

People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. - Mark Zuckerberg

Mimetic desire also explains why social proof is so powerful.

Gmail initially grew through invitations. Access was scarce and, crucially, you knew that somebody else already had what you wanted. Dropbox later turned customers themselves into distribution by rewarding referrals with additional storage.

The important point is not simply to create desire, but to make existing desire observable.

I’m seeing a tiny version of this with Daily View. Saying I’ve built a calendar for older people is one thing. Being able to say that a friend’s 96-year-old mother loves it is so much more powerful.

Suddenly it is no longer merely an idea. There is a real person using it and another family can imagine someone like their own mother or father doing the same.

This is why our first users are valuable in ways that have nothing to do with revenue. If nobody can see them, their influence is limited. If potential customers can see people like themselves using and recommending the product, those customers become models for others.

The strongest products don’t just demonstrate features. They make existing desire visible.

5. Be careful whose game you play

Play long-term games with long-term people. - Naval Ravikant

Startup culture comes with a ready-made list of things we are supposed to want: funding, rapid growth, employees, press coverage, impressive valuations and eventually an exit.

Spend enough time around people pursuing those things and they can start to feel like objectives rather than choices.

I’ve had to think about this myself. When I was made redundant earlier this year, the obvious response was to update my CV and look for another corporate job. That was what people with my background generally did and for a while it felt like the default answer.

But once I separated what I was supposed to want from what I actually wanted, the answer changed. I wanted to write, build small software products and decide for myself what I worked on. A salary was no longer the automatic answer.

The same question applies to founders.

Do we want to employ 100 people or does running a large company look successful because other founders admire it? Do we need investment or has raising money become a form of scorekeeping? Would a small profitable business giving us control of our time suit us more?

None of those choices is inherently right or wrong. The point is to recognise that our ambitions are influenced by the people around us.

A crowded market may look attractive precisely because everybody else thinks it is attractive. An unfashionable problem may look uninteresting precisely because nobody else is excited by it.

I’m increasingly conscious of this as I build my own small products. It is very easy to look at other founders and start adopting their scorecards: users, revenue, funding, followers, employees.

But perhaps Girard’s most useful lesson is that we should occasionally inspect the scoreboard itself.

Who are my customers copying? Who am I copying? And do I actually want what they want?

Those questions might help us build better startups.

They might also stop us spending years playing somebody else’s game.

Want more?

Seven Steps to Drive Product Demand post by Phil Martin

How to Build a Brand that Makes Money post by Phil Martin

If René Girard is right, the challenge isn’t to avoid imitation. It’s to notice when it is shaping what we build, what we buy and what we decide is worth wanting.

Have fun.

Phil…

I was sitting at a random rest stop off I-5 last weekend, eating a gas station sandwich in my car, and I started talking to a couple in a massive motorhome next to me. Super nice people, retired, living the dream.

Then the guy looks at me and goes, "Man, I wish I did this when my back didn't hurt every time the weather changed."

That sentence has been living in my head all week.

We talk so much about waiting until we're "established" or until we have the perfect budget saved up before we actually go explore or take a weird trip. But honestly, waiting around until everything is financially perfect feels like a trap. I live in Seattle, so my budget is constantly crying, and my "adventure vehicle" is literally just a hatchback with the back seats folded down. It’s cramped, I’m usually slightly sore, and it’s zero percent glamorous.

But I'm doing it now while I can actually run up a trail without needing three business days to recover.

You don't need a massive savings account or a month off to start doing the things you keep saving for "someday." A long weekend, a cheap sleeping bag, and a willingness to eat crappy snacks on the road is usually enough to clear your head.

Someone who feels the same, how did you go travel on a budget? Are you glad you didn't wait for a better moment?

A little experience and taste of freedom in nature, before the backpacking nomad life around Europe with longboard 😌 Winter departure ❄️

🌲 LOOKING TO BUILD A DIFFERENT KIND OF LIFE 🚙

I'm a 41-year-old single dad beginning a more nomadic lifestyle with my kids — traveling, homeschooling, working along the way, learning practical skills, and living with less.

I'm looking to connect with good people, farms, homesteaders, small businesses, property owners, and families who value hard work and mutual exchange.

I can offer:

🔨 General handyman & property work

🌱 Lawn, cleanup & outdoor work

❄️ Snow removal

🍞 Fresh homemade sourdough & desserts

🍳 Cooking and meal preparation

🛠️ Help with projects and maintenance

🤝 Reliable help, conversation and community

In exchange, I'm interested in short-term work, campsites, parking, reduced-cost lodging, food exchanges, barter, and mutually beneficial arrangements.

My goal isn't to accumulate more stuff. It's to build a life centered around family, freedom, useful work, self-reliance, nature, and community.

The kids will be homeschooled along the way, and I'm looking forward to turning the road itself into part of our education.

If you're a property owner who could use a hand, a farmer who needs help, someone with a project sitting unfinished, or just someone who believes there are better ways for people to help each other out — I'd love to hear from you.

We're not looking for a handout.

We're looking for a place to contribute.

🚙🌲🍞🔨