How To Survive As A Digital Nomad
I Glenn Madden owner of Glenn Website Design am American and have lived in Indonesia for 19 years and am still here.
I got married to my wife from Indonesia in 1998. We had a daughter born in America, in 2000. Then in 2001, we ran into problems with US immigration. My infant daughter and my wife were stranded in Indonesia without me barred from returning to the USA for 10 years due to a mistake US immigration made with filing her papers. They blamed us. Anyway long story short I fought it for 2 years then in 2003, I moved to Indonesia. I left a job with Pfizer to survive on my own online business https://tradur.com, that was my first.
At first, it was rough. I had never made enough money over the internet by itself to live on before I made the move. It took some doing but after moving to Indonesia I was able to get new online customers that wanted furniture made in Indonesia. I also brought in a few new clients for doing web design. The two business models I started worked great together. My web design skills improved with marketing and after a few years, I had customers from various countries ordering my furniture.
Immigration
One of the biggest challenges was dealing with immigration in Indonesia so my daughter and I stayed legal. For the first few years, I had to make a trip to Singapore every three months to make a new family visa there. After about 5 years I was finally able to get a KITAS which I could renew every 5 years. Now I have a KITAP which is a permanent stay visa, which still has to be renewed every 5 years. But with all of these including what I have now I was never able to get a work permit. So I am not allowed to seek employment here in Indonesia even now after 19 years. If I had not learned to make a living through my internet skills and eventually furniture building skills our life would have been much different.
New Busines Deals
In 2005 a builders group out of Tulsa Oklahoma discovered me via my website business TradUR.com. They hired me full-time to set up a furniture factory in Indonesia for them. Not only was I selling furniture to the group in the USA but my website marketing was doing so well that I had regular customers from the UK, Poland, Singapore, and Australia.
In 2015 some of my business clients realized I had a talent for website design and online marketing. I established the new business Glenn Website Design. Initially, I gave away business websites with wholesale furniture purchases. The clients loved it and it brought in even more business. New web design clients came and went through the years without any promotion of the business. I preferred to focus my attention on getting online furniture sales for my own business and clients which was much more profitable than competing in the web design industry.
Everything changed with COVID. The furniture business which relied on international shipping took a big hit when freight costs went from $5,000 to $20,000. With the lockdowns, I was not able to receive new web design clients in the office as I was operating at the time. Over the past 2 years, I have been working with remote workers and have established a system where all the workers and the clients interact online. Glenn Website Design is officially back in business in a really BIG way.
Living in Indonesia
Over the years I learned to speak enough of the national language Bahasa that I was able to communicate. Never made it much beyond that even until now. Problem is that most people here do not speak the national language in normal conversation. My wife’s family speaks Sundanese. But when the furniture business got going she was afraid at first to move to Jepara from Bandung because the people in Jepara speak Javanese. But we made do. My daughter ended up learning to speak Javanese, Sundanese, Bahasa, and English. She even carries a little of my southern US accent in her talking.
I love living in Indonesia. The people here are very welcoming and to some point overly nice. They are afraid of offending anyone and it makes for very polite society. Sometimes my American-to-the-point way bothers my wife but I think she has learned to accept it.
If you ever get to Indonesia you have to come by Bandung and visit me. Give me a call and I will be happy to be your tour guide at +62 85 865 670 655. It is always nice to have visitors whether American, European or other.
