Honest and respectful question: why create another forum for nomads and struggle to attract a user base, when perfectly forums already exist (e.g. NomadGate, also powered by Discourse)?
Creating another nomad forum without a specific and significant differentiation (say, female nomads, or Nomads in Europe), only works to further split the nomad community.
Please reconsider creating this forum. I’m not affiliated with NomadGate or any other forum. I just want the community to be stronger, and more united.
Hi @DNDan, thanks for your feedback and for your question, much appreciated. As one of the co-founders, I thought it would be better to answer myself
I would start by first addressing the question about differentiation. In case you didn’t have a chance to learn more about us, I would invite you to check out our story and what Freaking Nomads stands for, including the job we are doing to fight stereotypes around the digital nomad community. We are not just here to provide info and share resources, but our mission is to refresh the distorted image that the media and people have around digital nomads. You can just do a quick search and you’ll find plenty of articles scapegoating digital nomads or that write click-bait articles around “the dark side of digital nomadism”. We are a no-bs digital nomad publication of what the actual digital nomad life is, independently from what these click-bait articles say. We share continuously positive stories of digital nomads coming from different life paths (nomad families, female solo nomad travelers, and other people from so many different backgrounds!).
We are proud to say that we have created an awesome community of people that are tired of this narrative and you can check some of their stories on Instagram where we share them every week. We share there also weekly the great comments we receive from the 3,000+ people that every week engage with our newsletter.
Many people have been asking for a way to interact with each other and reached out to us to see where they could join our community. So, instead of selling an exclusive membership like many do, we thought a FREE forum open to anyone would be a great way for nomads to connect.
We are super fans of all the digital nomad forums and channels out there, including NomadGate. I don’t see how we would be “splitting the nomad community” to be honest considering that, from what I can see, they have 18764 users right now that, although it’s an impressive number, it’s still 0.5% of the total number of digital nomads that’s exist just the US (!) if we consider the estimated number of 35 millions from public available data. Clearly, there is an audience that doesn’t identify themselves in existing forums and there is. It’s like saying that Facebook is splitting the digital nomad community by allowing the creation of hundreds of groups around digital nomadism. I guess that the fact that people engage with those Facebook Groups is enough to justify their existence.
These are just a few notes I thought to share, but I really thank you for your question and for working toward making the community stronger and more united. Even if you might not necessarily agree with us existing, that sounds so Freaking Nomad, I must say!
Thank you for sharing more on why creating the Freaking Nomads community.
I got to know about this platform during one of my research for Digital Nomad visas; besides the beautiful UI/UX of this community, I learned a lot from the articles I read - which are helping me as I begin my Digital Nomad journey.
Also, the newsletters from @irenelidiawang are educational and inspiring!
So yes, there are other digital nomad communities, but creating Freaking Nomads at this time is a great thing you, the founders, have done. Thank you so much.
P.S: Looking forward to an IRL community meetup sometime
Actual hardcore research, not SEO listicles like “Best X Countries to Work From as a Digital Nomad” (sorry) or 4 articles about eSIMs when what you need to know is about esimdb.com and esims.io. There’s already more than enough fluff like that on the Internet. And worse, it pollutes LLMs, so they come up with quasi-useless generic advice instead of specific actionable information.
I sense some hate for Freaking Nomads in your words which really makes me think that we are doing a good job. Even with you expressing your opinion on a free forum we created (funny, isn’t it?). So thank you for that
It’s funny how you say that we write “SEO articles” when you actually just pasted a bunch of articles with affiliates to NomadGate (the forum you say you keep saying you are not affiliated with) when you just used the oldest SEO tactic of getting backlinks from our site to very commercial articles like Insurance and banks hoping people will use your links to get affiliate commissions or get some free SEO value out of it (that’s hilarious, let me tell you).
I could share our insurance articles (written by our top writer in the health and insurance space that have spent years writing about it), or our articles about cards written by a digital nomad writer who writes about cards for huge publications or even our Wise review written by a digital nomad himself who wrote his own experience about using this card, not just an “SEO article” like you say, but I think you won’t probably change your idea anyway in your crusade against us. So it’s fine anyway.
Not sure if you have any ideas of the effort that goes beyond a publication, especially in the era of AI where anyone can write content nowadays, but we are one of the few small publications that still spend a ton of time researching our content, trying to publish content people can find useful while spending hundreds of dollars to hire top digital nomad writers (yes, we actually pay our writers to write content, that’s not for free - every content you say it’s “SEO article”, it actually cost a few hundred dollars).
We host experts and digital nomad authorities on our site, like this article about how to find accommodation and this article about the actual trends in the industries by ones of the biggest authorities in this space so we don’t really accept you saying that we write articles just for SEO.
Again, thanks for pasting two threads where you just did the same as you are doing here. Pasting links and defending the links to the forum you keep saying you are “not affiliated with”.
It’s easy to criticize digital nomad entrepreneurs who are trying to contribute to the community, although, in my opinion, it’s very sad. There is a ton of terrible advice by the big publications like Forbes, Lonely Planet, Travel + Leisure who don’t live this lifestyle and just write clickbait articles and you would hope that other digital nomads who support each other. But apparently, that’s not the case.
Thanks for your rant here and for choosing to start this crusade against us to hope to put us on a bad light on our forum. I’m sure that the people who read us every day and that know the work that goes beyond the scene at Freaking Nomads know what the truth is anyway.
I prefer to focus on the beautiful emails I receive every day like this one I just received this morning after sending our weekly newsletter (thanks Jenny, if you ever happen to read this ):
What in the world are you talking about? I don’t earn anything from any links. My links from here to Nomadgate don’t even have tracking information, and the links on Nomadgate, if anything, earn a commission for the author of those articles, which IMO would be well deserved given their quality.
I’m a former Google and I work as a consultant for Anthropic. I wouldn’t even bother to set up such ridiculous “passive income streams” as affiliate crap. Never have. I’m purely philosophically motivated as another forum owner who doesn’t want to see small communities split pointlessly and struggle to attract users. Sadly (honestly) FreakingNomads didn’t have any posts in 2 weeks until today (and almost nothing 2 weeks prior). I know how how it is to attract and retain a forum user base. I’ve been running the QS Forum since 2011.
I also despise affiliate marketing and drop-shipping, the latter publicly.
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