One of the most beautiful and appealing things about being a digital nomad is that you get to choose wherever you want to work from. Many pick Bali for its lovely scenery, low cost of living, and burgeoning startup scene.
For Sai Blackbyrn, however, it wasn’t a choice. The story of how the born-and-raised Londoner arrived in the “Island of the Gods” started when he was facing a year-long stagnation in his business as a dating coach for men. That was in 2011. Blackbyrn and his investor, who had in 2010 plunged US$100,000 to take the concept to Australia, decided to run a high-ticket event in Bali to get some traction.
The event went well, but things took a turn for the worse when he was on his way back to Australia from Bali. “I was stopped at immigration and interrogated for three hours [...] I was on an exploratory business visa, and it turned out that in order to run the business the way I was running it, I needed to be on an ordinary business visa,” Blackbyrn recalls. “A slight error in my visa agent’s judgement, but the consequences were huge.”
And huge they were. He was consequently put into a detention center, had most of his possessions taken away, and was barred access to his bank accounts. “And the very next day, I was shipped back to Bali, where my last port of call was,” he adds.
Blackbyrn’s few possessions after that fateful incident.
Here were the possessions that he was allowed to carry: AUD 450 (US$386) in cash, carry-on luggage with some clothes, a 17-inch MacBook Pro which he claims “was literally blowing smoke, it was so old,” and a Blue Yeti microphone.
Turning to Facebook for help
Because Blackbyrn wasn’t around to oversee his business, the Australian company quickly disintegrated, leaving him with close to nothing in his possession and no way out of Bali. A three-year ban from returning Down Under that was imposed on him made sure of that. Faced with the harsh new reality, he turned to the most cost-effective means of rebooting his dating business: the internet.
“I turned to the internet to figure out how to create a business which was location independent, required no capital to start up, and needed no qualifications,” he says. “I went through my Facebook friends list – and even my mother’s Facebook friends list – offering free one-on-one sessions to potential coaching clients.”
Not surprisingly, it wasn’t very successful. “As you can imagine, saying to someone ‘you need help with your dating life’ didn’t go down too well,” he admits. “So, out of the 2,000 people I contacted, I only got five clients.”
The one good thing that came out of this was that he managed to find a mentor, an established internet marketer, whom he had coached five years ago, and convinced him to provide guidance for free.
The small sum of money, however, was enough for him to regroup and rethink his strategy. “I started using Facebook ads, sending my potential customers to a landing page and onto a one-on-one session with me,” Blackbyrn recalls.
“Over the months, the process became more and more optimized, and eventually all I was doing were one-on-one sessions, and converting them into paid coaching clients.”
He continued doing this for the next four months, and eventually his dating business reached a stage of “continual profitability.” Having become a veritable master of this sales process, an idea occurred to him: “If this funnel works for me, what about other coaches?”
Raring to go, he immediately got down to work putting together Double Your Database, an information product business teaching coaches in the personal development arena how to build up a client base using the internet – with very little, if any, resources – from anywhere in the world. Blackbyrn proceeded to launch it in 2012 after working on it on the side, and then full-time, for seven months.
To put it simply, he condensed the process into three key principles: automate repetitive mundane tasks; only delegate things you know how to do yourself and never ask somebody to do something you don’t know how to do yourself; and never delegate sales and marketing, as these are skills that any businessperson must learn.
Blackbyrn says that it seemed like a pipe dream at that point in time, but what happened next blew him away – he managed to hit a five-figure income by the second month. US$14,450 in sales with a 65 percent margin, to be exact. He explains that information product businesses tend to have high margins.
Fast forward to today, and Double Your Database now has six products in their lineup. More, his ban was lifted earlier this year in April, and he’ll be returning to Australia for the first time in three years for a friend’s wedding.
Top right: the passport stamp which barred him from entering Australia
He admits that he still feels “nervous thinking about immigration.”
Lessons from exile
According to Blackbyrn, his banishment in Bali made him realize three things. Firstly, having a mentor is essential – for Blackbyrn, it was his internet marketer friend. “A mentor will push you down roads which you are too afraid to take alone,” he emphasizes. “They will make sure that you are accountable to getting results which you set. This shortens the learning curve by five to 10 years.”
Secondly, throwing money at a problem doesn’t fix it. “When I was running my dating coaching business, the product was great, and we got some great results. But I couldn’t grow the business,” he reveals. “I thought it was because I had no money to invest, or that my team was not good enough to do the things I didn’t want to. But in actual fact, it was because I had no idea – and no desire to learn – about sales and marketing.”
That was an expensive mistake for Blackbyrn. “For me it took me throwing away US$100,000, having everything that a startup could dream of, and still not succeeding, to realize that it’s not about the resources you have – it’s about your own resourcefulness.”
Finally, creating a solid sales funnel for your business is essential. Blackbyrn claims that almost 70 percent of his income came from repeat customers, and not new ones. “This can take time – it took me 10 months of trial and error to create it – but it is worth it a million times over,” he explains.
See: Want to work abroad? Here are 8 digital nomad friendly cities in Asia
This post Stranded in Bali with few possessions, this ‘digital exile’ carved out a new business appeared first on Tech in Asia.
Stranded in Bali with few possessions, this ‘digital exile’ carved out a new business
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