Mortgage slaves vs free people. Digital nomads are creating a huge market. It's time to find your place on it

Apartment on mortgage for 35 years. Small, but its own. And the area is good, only N kilometers to the Moscow Ring Road. Stability and restful sleep in your own bed, tea from your favorite mug in the evenings.

Or you can live not in an apartment, but on the entire planet. Travel, explore the world, change locations, houses and countries. Remote work and travel life – this is how more and more people live. They were called digital nomads and by 2035 they will about a billion. They create a huge market. Let's look for cool business opportunities there.

Who are digital nomads?

There is a person in this field who can be called the first digital nomad. This is an American journalist Steve Roberts. In 1983, he sold his house, got on a super-duper high-tech bicycle and rode across America.

Steve made his living writing articles about technology, which he obviously knew something about, judging by the bike. The only thing that helped him was the Motosat satellite communication system that was launched at that time.

That is, Steve was not a proto-blogger, he stayed in one place for a long period and worked remotely. I didn’t write about my travels, but did the same as at home, but via the Internet.

Millions of people followed his example. But later, when it became convenient to work online. The Internet has become quite fast and digital professions have become quite developed. About 15 years ago it became quite convenient to take a laptop, a few things with you and change location. And after a month, six months or a year, change again.

The pandemic has dramatically turned millions of people into digital nomads. In the USA there were immediately 50% more in 2020 and most of the “new people” decided to continue their nomadic lifestyle.

Digital nomads do not buy real estate or become attached to a place. They are mobile, wealthy and open to new experiences. Great consumers. But what do they need?

Housing

A comfortable place to sleep, eat and relax is a basic need. Digital nomads add a few more demands to the mix, so finding the right rental property for them is a challenge.

The most basic thing is that there are no comfortable workplaces in rental housing. Nomads usually work from home, so a large work desk and a comfortable chair are essential. Anyone who has tried to sit at the kitchen table with a laptop for eight hours straight will know what I mean. You also need good internet.

The second is the rental period. Traditionally, apartments are rented either daily or for at least a year. Both are poorly suited for digital nomads who prefer to live in one place for several months at a time. And naturally, there should be a convenient opportunity to choose and book remotely.

How to make money: we adapt traditional rental housing for digital nomads and get new business.

WeWork founder Adam Newman recently raised $350 million for his new company Flow and used the money to buy thousands of apartments for digital nomads. The logic will be the same as that of his coworking spaces – in any big city you can find a cool place to work and make new friends. Fast and transparent. The same model applies to housing.

You don’t have to buy your own home; you can create an aggregator of housing offers for digital nomads. Here Flatio It is growing successfully in Europe, but there is still a lot of room in this niche for other players. You can rent housing for a long time, retrofit it to meet the needs of nomads, and rent it out to them.

This is what a digital nomad's office looks like. Photo stolen from Mesto

This is roughly what the co-living network does Mesto. The guys offer digital nomads to live in a community of similar people in cool places. Technically, they rent a villa or aparthotel for a long period of time and rent out rooms to digital nomads on a monthly basis. At the top is a community of residents with the right values, on which all marketing is built. Now it’s a good idea to follow this scheme and make your own product.

Children

It's great to be a digital nomad when you are not burdened with family and children. Traveling with a child is a completely different story; he needs to learn and socialize in the company of his peers. But choosing between children and freedom is such a pleasure.

I recently did something cool interview with the CEO of Mesto colivings Nikita Kuimov and asked about this. It turned out that you don’t have to choose. There are schools just for such cases, like FLVS and others. Children study online most of the time, but every six months to a year they all get together for a few weeks to build social connections.

This scheme does not solve all problems, but where there are problems, there are business opportunities. For those who understand pedagogy, group dynamics and education, online schools for children of digital nomads are a very interesting niche.

Health insurance and medicine

Location is at the core of health systems. People generally don’t fall off the planet just because they are attached to clinics. Digital nomads need a different format, some kind of global medicine.

Nikita Kuimov lives in three countries at the same time and plans his treatment based on this. He estimates that it is better to treat teeth in Sri Lanka in winter than in the USA in summer. Such plans are not made quickly. And when many people are forced to spend a lot of time solving their problem, a niche for business appears.

There is still plenty of room in the health insurance market for digital nomads. The main players are start-ups at the growth stage, their offerings are often localized geographically. For example, only in the USA. So you can definitely find your place.

Today, digital nomads are mostly young and healthy, but this will change over the years. The business will grow with the market.

And much more

This is by no means a complete list of digital nomad needs. Help with documents, convenient banking with low commissions in different countries, hubs for finding remote work and much more. All of these are niches for businesses that will grow. After all, there are more and more digital nomads every year.