Friend Theory Nomad Bali Experiment

It has been an exhausting 15 days. I am writing this at 4AM from London Stansted airport, taking advantage of the staff not letting people sleep while waiting for connecting flights.

Since I am jet-lagged anyways, I might as well make the most of this time.

It is a test run of the sort of things we have planned to do in Europe during July and August: meet our users community, spread the word in places where many of long-term and short-term travelers visit a lot, hear feedback about our idea, product and business, and continue a global networking as entrepreneurs.

So we made sure the 3 co-founders and our first developer could all make it at the same time, we found cheap flights, and off we went.

It’s been very challenging to make sure we managed the travel logistics and the extra workload of deploying major changes in the website back-end, while live.

I then went down to Uluwatu, to a really nice place right on the cliffs of Padang-Padang, a beautiful sufring spot. Carlos and Carlo joined me there the following day, and we started working together with a really good schedule. Early morning surf, then driving to [Collabo] coworking space for the day, and exploring around in the evenings.

At this time, I deployed the graph database along with a few other updates. As planned, it instantly made the platform performance faster. However, this triggered a bug that we had not noticed before to happened more often. I had to work very long hours to fix it as it was on our production server, and the slow internet in this area surely did not help deploying updates and fixes.

Some nights I even ended up working in front of a grocery shop that had an internet connection, while about 25 people were sitting at the front, watching the TV broadcast of the Football World Cup. Finally I managed to fix it all and was able to move on to other improvements of the platform.

Guillermo, the Friend Theory front-end developer who joined us last month, joined us there. We had the full team together in the most amazing HQ we could dream of. Needless to say, our productivity went through the roof with such a good lifestyle (and a better internet connection).

We went back to Ubud to run a think tank around the business side of Friend Theory, which was also very productive.

We had a couple of friends coming to visit us at the villa while we were there (Have I mentioned Friend Theory?)

It really showed the value and the importance of being together in a great environment for work and for fun, and got us to think where we will end up setting up our fixed base for the company.

Now, we are all on our way back to our respective homes for to visit our families, and then we will undertake a new challenge in Europe…

More on that very soon!

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