I'm Arie. I got most of this wrong first.
Nine years running an online business from forty-odd countries. This site exists because writing things down was the only way I found to stop re-solving the same problems — and it turned out other people had them too.
The honest version is less romantic than the About page usually is. I didn't set out to travel. I set out to stop commuting, and travel was a side effect of realising nobody was checking where I was.
What followed was about four years of expensive mistakes: underpricing, no contracts, no backups, one genuinely bad client, and a stretch in 2022 where I was working across a nine-hour time difference and sleeping about five hours a night without noticing what it was costing me.
Everything on this site comes out of that. If a post seems oddly specific about a failure mode, it's because I hit it.
Quit the agency job
Went freelance building websites from a spare room in Rotterdam. Undercharged for two years straight.
First long trip that didn't break the business
Six weeks in Southeast Asia. Learned that the problem was never the wifi — it was that I had no systems.
Went properly location-independent
Sold most of it, kept the laptop. This is when the expensive lessons started arriving in volume.
Laptop died in Porto
Three days offline, no recovery plan. Everything I now write about backups traces back to that week.
Started writing it down
Mostly so I'd stop re-solving the same problems. The newsletter came first; the site came after people kept asking for the archive.
Four courses, 7,500 students
Still solo, still moving, still publishing the parts that didn't work.
I use it before I write it
Nothing gets recommended that hasn't been through my own business. If I haven't paid for it, used it, or broken it, it doesn't appear.
I publish the failures
The automations that died, the gear I stopped carrying, the six weeks my writing got worse. That's usually the useful half.
Corrections happen in the open
Dated notes, never silent edits. If something here is wrong, tell me and I'll fix it visibly.
I say when I don't know
Visas and tax are the clearest example. I'll explain how to structure things so a real professional can help you cheaply, and stop there.
- Sponsored posts. I've turned down every one, and I'd tell you if that changed.
- Affiliate links dressed up as recommendations — see the resources page for the full disclosure.
- Income reports. They're marketing, and they make people feel bad for no informational gain.
- Advice on visas, residency or tax. Not qualified, won't pretend.
- Vendor rankings I haven't tested. The social growth posts name no providers for exactly this reason.
- Urgency tactics, fake countdowns, or a price that goes up at midnight.
The newsletter is the main thing.
The site is the archive; the Thursday email is where new material lands first. If you only do one thing here, do that one.
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