Ask HN: Digital nomads, where's the best place in the world to work from?

It may, for example, be fantastic to be a Digital Nomad™ from the Nomad's perspective in Bolivia ... but from the business perspective be an absolute nightmare :)

Or wonderful to setup shop in the Maldives ... but your Nomads would all hate it

-------------

Note - I know nothing about the business climates of Bolivia or the Maldives - just using then as examples :)

Most would agree all the amenities are good to have.

But then people digress into two groups. One group of nomads want to be in the "poppin" location where there's tons of other people etc.

Other people like to be in relatively calm/secluded spots that still have amenities.

Besides the significant hassle setting up legally in foreign countries, co-living places are a target for immigration and labor law enforcement, since the guests are almost certainly working without work permits. Harder to stay under the radar as a digital nomad when you’re living at a place that advertises as a haven for DNs.

There’s no best place to work from. DNs tend to congregate more in some places (Chiang Mai, Ubud, Medelin) than others for various reasons, mainly price. Big cities are expensive, beach towns don’t have the infrastructure or can’t attract enough DNs.

But after I thought about it seriously, I found there are a lot of wonderful domestic places (or nearby countries if you're living in a small country). Usually, those places speak similar languages, cultures are different but mutually understandable so I can live in those places and maximize the joy of living.

There are nice and cheap places all over the world, and there's no need to travel to the other side of the globe to find one... Unless you already have your dreamed one in mind then you already got your answer. IMHO In both ways, you don't really need other people to tell you where your perfect place is.

Seriously, remote-hostile places (expensive, terrible network, dangerous) are pretty easy to identify, and they are much fewer than remote-friendly places.

I'll be there next week if anyone wants to meet up!

I love Tokyo, but the value factor certainly isn't there.

Before realizing that for me at that stage in my life the best place for me ironically was the country where I started, just in a bigger city with a good metro system.

If you wanna determine this you'd be best off constructing a matrix of priority systems (weather, cost of living, language, broad cultural region a la northern european, southern european/latin, east asian, latin american, etc), nature in the area, etc) and make a tool for an individual to rank their priorities in terms of categories/factors, then rank the options _within_ each of those categories/factors, and then try to score the results for them. But even then, people often don't know what they want or care about until they've experienced a variety of places.

Spend a few days at sea working, then dock and explore for a day or two. Then a few more days working.

Of course it’s an environmental nightmare but it seems nice.

Yeah you can just fly to Chiang Mai with your laptop and work from a coffee shop and no ones likely to care. Because you’re one person.

Setting up a company in another country is hard and often expensive. It’s hard to imagine how the business you describe wouldn’t come under the scrutiny of local immigration and/or labour officials, and face legitimate legal barriers and/or expectations of bribes (obviously depending on the nature of governments where you chose).

Step 2: Start your blog about how easy it is to do digital gonadary, and sell subscriptions to it.

At least; when I was travelling this seemed to be what all of them were doing.