RV Nomads Help Fellow Travelers Get Online

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

What's up and welcome to Side Hustle School. I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau, episode 1001. We have turned over that odometer. You know how you have a car, and whenever you pass a certain milestone, probably isn't 1,000 miles, it's more like 100,000 miles. But you're always like, oh wow, okay.

Well, here we are, episode 1001. When a couple turns its back on the big city in favor of a nomadic lifestyle, they stumble across an intriguing business. And you've heard of people who work remotely and set out to travel, maybe even some of them doing it in an RV. But this couple has been doing it for 13 years and counting. During this time, they completely transform their business, start an all new business, and they continue to evolve.

They also remind me of me in some ways, except I don't have an RV, but just in the sense that they didn't set out to do anything at all in the how to work from anywhere space. They actually worked from anywhere, they had remote jobs. But it was over time, and in encountering the same questions over and over, they began to think, hmm, maybe we should do something about this. So if the universe, or at least the people around you are asking you the same questions over and over, maybe you should think about providing the answers. The story is called RV Nomads Help Fellow Travelers Get Online.

It's coming right up after this shout out to our sponsor. [Music]

When Chris Dunphy and Cherie Bayard packed up an RV in 2006, they traded their homebound lifestyle to the open road. They both worked remotely, and without ties to a traditional office, they figured it could be a fun way to live, at least for a while. Turned out that they were embarking on what would become at least a 13 year adventure. To be clear, they weren't taking it easy this whole time.

Cherie was a self-employed software developer running a business alongside her father. Chris was a mobile tech expert, helping customers with technical issues from afar. The best part about their jobs was that as long as they had a laptop and an internet connection, they could literally work from anywhere. They took to the lifestyle right away. Without the constraints of a daily commute or office politics, they found themselves with extra time and head space.

So they used that to start a travel block. They called it Technomatia, and they wrote about their road trip and ways across the country while working full time. Much of the content centered around RV specific items like solar power, batteries, and accessing the internet while on the go. That blog built up some solid traffic, and with it an audience. The audience loved to ask questions, especially about that last topic, mobile internet.

How to access it? Which plans were best? What did they do when something went wrong? The questions came in so rapidly that responding to them all was a part-time unpaid job. This went on for quite a while, until in 2013, they received some terrible news.

Cherie's father and business partner had passed away. It was a trying time for the couple, and Cherie found that the best recovery was to keep herself busy. So she took on a side project. She went through their existing blog posts, as well as all the questions they'd received from their visitors, and compiled them into a guide entitled the Mobile Internet Handbook. Neither Chris nor Cherie expected much from it.

They listed it for sale on their site, and continued life as RV nomads on the open road. A few sales rolled in, but then their RV stopped rolling, shortly thereafter, courtesy of an engine breakdown. When their wheels were up and running again, they decided it was time to reassess, perhaps take a sabbatical, and make some tough decisions about what to do next in their careers. Trying to run their business as well as travel while working on two side projects had them on a collision course with exhaustion. Interestingly, during that time, their book began to take on a life of its own, and sales revved up.

Simultaneously, the questions they received from readers only increased. Many of those questions were the same, sometimes felt like driving around in circles. In response, they opened a Facebook group, targeting RV nomads who were interested in mobile internet. The idea was with the community behind things, it might take the pressure off Chris and Cherie to answer all the questions. The community as a whole could help each other out, but this plan turned out to be a dead end.

The questions kept coming, even faster than before, and people wanted answers from Chris and Cherie. Expressing this dismay with members of the group led one of them to make a suggestion. Their idea was for Chris and Cherie to consider a premium membership. Members could pay in exchange for more content and personal advice, at least then they'd be getting paid for all their efforts. It seemed ridiculous to them, but they decided to give it a try.

By now, the handbook needed updating, so they made a crowdfunding campaign to fund the rewrite. One of the reward tiers included this premium membership. To their surprise, 100 people signed up and prepaid for the Mobile Internet Resource Center. They built an extensive website writing about options to keep online while being an RV nomad. They covered industry news, new gear, as well as extensive reviews of all the available mobile plans.

They figured they could make money from premium memberships for additional content, as well as affiliate income from the products and services they referred users to. First, they had a modest goal to make $100 per day. 3,000 per month would be plenty of cash for them to stay afloat, especially with their frugal lifestyle. But they drove past that goal in two months flat. They kept adding content and memberships kept increasing.

After another couple of years had passed, they'd surpassed the money they were making in their previous jobs and businesses. On top of that, they also hired four part-time assistants to help keep the site updated, which is important as they now have a valuable resource of over 1,000 unique pages of content and a fanatical membership that pays to support it. That resource now pays the couple an equivalent salary to working in a major tech hub like San Francisco or New York. But instead of living in those high cost cities, they're able to earn it while traveling the country in their RV. [Music]

Did you know that there are an estimated one million Americans now living in RVs?

It really is a movement. So it's good that Cherie and Chris began paying attention to all those questions and asking themselves, well, how can we not just answer the same questions over and over, but actually create a sustainable resource, actually do something that allows us to get paid for our expertise, and as you heard, they've transformed their entire business, even as they have continued in that lifestyle of living in the RV and traveling around. As I worked on this episode, I also wanted to give a shout out to Heath and Alyssa Padgett, good friends of mine for, I don't know, five or six years now at least, if not longer than that. They live in an RV and travel quite a bit running their business. They also put together a conference for other RV entrepreneurs called, well, wait for it, therventrepreneur.com.

Go and check that out if you are one of those one million Americans living in RVs or just interested in how all this kind of stuff works. Of course, you'll also want to check out Technomatia, which we will link up on the show notes page. That notes page is sidehustleschool.com/101101. The odometer has turned, but the show continues, just like Chris and Cherie in their RV. Thank you so much for listening.

I hope you do something to get closer to one of your goals today. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Cytosol School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.