I want to start by reminding ourselves that we will very often times lean on the kindness of other people to help us grow personally and professionally. Writing this article helped me realise how much we rely and count on others to help us grow, and how I should play my part for other people.
So if anyone wants to ever connect with someone that I may know, reach out and I’ll try to help. Tech communities have always been incredibly helpful in my experience, and we can all play our part to help grow the next generation of people and the next wave of connections.
It’s amazing the connections you can build when you’re doing the things you love — Shedlyne B
I hope you all meet wonderful people everywhere you go.
There’s a very famous quote that I first heard back in 2019 that got me thinking about the value of relationships, friendships and networks
Your network is your net-worth
For a large part of my early career, I’d always recognised that networking was a key your career. It came with classic sayings — ‘It’s about who you know, not what you know’. There’s plenty more wisdom and literature out there on the importance of networking, but this article is going to look techniques you can use to keep networking effectively while travelling across the world.
It’s fairly easy to find opportunities to network when you’re going to one office, live in one city and meet with one group of designers. When you travel and work, networking isn’t necessarily harder, but you will have to tweak your existing strategies. Like with many things in life, you have to put yourself in the right positions:
Put yourself in the right environments to succeed.
James Clear, Atomic Habits.
Let’s start by creating that environment with a key first step 👇🏼
Set yourself a (numeric) goal
I started my travels in Europe, with Munich and Barcelona being my first two cities, both of which had a decent tech scene (BCN being huge). So, I set myself one goal for each city I went to:
Simply meet a new Product Designer every week.
I took this mindset with me wherever I went. It became my energy. This is a very powerful thing to have because it became my ‘Why’. With that, let’s start to look at some specific techniques…
1️⃣ Ask people in your current network
A no-brainer to get started with. Asking friends, current colleagues, ex-colleagues and so on can be a great starting point to meet new people in your network. Start by mentioning your ‘Why’ of course and see who might know who else.
Reach out to people you know that have:
- Big networks
- Clout in your industry
- Goodwill and kindness
These types of people can help get you connected to others in an quick and easy way. I’ve spoken to recruiters and veterans in the Design industry to reach out to a new group of people and get yourself to that wonderful 3-person intro chat that you crave. With that I have to give a big thank you to Tom Scott for setting me up in Barcelona 👇🏼
2️⃣ LinkedIn DM into people’s hearts (& stomachs 🍕)
LinkedIn DMs are sometimes a pit of cold-email death. I definitely see the need in cold outreach, but I recommend in this case, that something personal, to a low sample group, will give you a good conversion rate. Follow the exact steps to success:
- Search [Your Role]
- Filter by [City]
- Review the top results and look any connection possible, such as:
- A location close to you
- Interesting companies they work(ed) at
- Similarities in your backgrounds - DM them with a message asking them to lunch
- Repeat this with about 5 different people
This is how this looked for me when I contacted some people:
Asking kindly can go a long way. Asking kindly and offering lunch might go even further.
3️⃣ Find tech communities for your industry
I’d made the rookie mistake of overlooking communities in the past, but through building Zero To Design, I’d started to learn the incredible value of them. I’m not aware and likely will never be of all the wonderful communities that exist out there, and so through Technique 1, I landed on a happy accident and heard about Friends of Figma. Below is the chat excerpt:
That reccomendation led me to check out Friends of Figma, and find a certain Philip Klaus. He just so happened to also be building a Product Design agency, MVST. We had some awesome Vietnamese food and shared some learnings with each other. An epic meeting that came from a very happy accident.
Reddit groups are also good. Check out r/DigitalNomad, r/WeWork to get started.
4️⃣ Leverage co-working spaces
This one might be the one of the straightforward approaches you can take. I make it a priority to go to WeWorks in the cities I go to, not only because its a great way to get in the zone for work, but because its literally a melting pot of like-minded people.
I saw someone asking about the microwave at the WeWork in Barcelona and immediately realised they were also new to the space. I asked them while they were lunching and it turned out they were also travelling and working. We went for coffee the next day and spoke about our mindset, the changing working world and our travel tips. An truly wonderful person I won’t forget, who inspired the quote at the beginning of this article.
In another instance, I heard one person finishing up a call with smiles and then immediately breathing a deep sigh of relief after closing the window. I found it hilarious and let her know how funny it was watching from afar. She happened to work at a startup for vets, in Marketing, and invited me to dinner with her friends. Some happened to be in Social Media Marketing and led to some interesting conversations in the evening. More of a friendship story than a networking one, but the potential is there to ask in the future:
‘Hey, how is Product Design in your company looking?’
A closing note
A final note here about networking while being a Digital Nomad — if you do it right, you gonna spread your name and brand like crazy. Just think, you’re going to new places, meeting new people and learning different perspectives almost every month. Your potential is limitless 🔮
These are just a few of my tips so far as I start my journey to work remotely. I’ll be sharing more as I go via Medium, and also on social media 📹
For cool photos: https://www.instagram.com/sakkybl/
For cool videos: https://www.tiktok.com/@nomaddesigner
