This month I am celebrating the 7th birthday of my community, Digital Nomad Girls. I took this moment to celebrate this milestone, but also to reflect on everything I’ve learned. But first, let’s go back a few years.

Why I started DNG

In August 2015, I had been working online for only a few short months, I was living in Chiang Mai, Thailand and figuring out this whole digital nomad thing.

Before that, I was a scientist, but after receiving my PhD in 2013 I left the world of academia behind to travel the world. After backpacking through South and Central America and then doing a working holiday in Australia for a year, I decided to give this new lifestyle I heard about a go.

I had literally no idea what I was doing, I was a scientist and not a business owner.

But I was good at researching and experimenting so I set myself a challenge to try as many “digital nomad jobs” I could find and document my progress on my blog, SquareHippie. (I have since learned that there’s no such thing as a “digital nomad job”, it’s a lifestyle and not a career).

I’m a very extroverted and excitable person so once I started telling people about my challenge, I quickly started getting work. From my mum’s old colleagues in Munich, through new friends at the coworking space I was working from, and through random people I met who liked my story.

After a few months, I moved to Koh Phangan, the Thai island known for its full moon parties. I was lured there by the promise of a “digital nomad internship” which turned out to be basically a scam. Still, I made the best of it and enjoyed living on a tropical island for 5 months.

But unlike Chiang Mai, Koh Phangan didn’t have a digital nomad community at the time.

I felt quite isolated and lonely and craved a community of girlfriends like I had at home and also while I was backpacking. I was also sick and tired of the toxic masculinity displayed by all the bromads found in most mixed digital nomad communities.

After being called “hysterical” for asking a simple question (in a paid community btw) one too many times I had enough and decided to start my own little online family.

So I took to Facebook and started a new group that I very creatively (NOT!) called Digital Nomad Girls. I invited the women I had already met along the way, all my backpacking friends and also some of my friends from home.

And the rest is history

Well, at least for me it is. Within a few months, we reached 1000 members, within a year 5000, then a few months later 10,000.

Now, 7 years later, we have 34k members on Facebook, I run a small but thriving paid membership community called The Lab and I send a personal essay in my weekly newsletter every Friday to over 9000 women around the world (sign up for it here).

Most importantly, I have met countless friends, business besties, travel buddies, mentors and members over the years.

To say Digital Nomad Girls has changed my life would be an understatement. Sometimes it’s hard to remember what my life even was like before I started this beautiful community.

But that doesn’t mean it’s all sunshine and rainbows (just like the digital nomad lifestyle isn’t all sunshine and rainbows). I’ve spent literally thousands of hours, shed countless tears, spent sleepless nights and was ready to burn it all down at least a dozen times.

But I also learned so, so much about humans, women, this lifestyle, business, social media, life, myself and what I am good (and bad) at.

To celebrate our 7th anniversary, I wanted to share 7 lessons I learned from running the world’s first female digital nomad community.

1. The catfight trope is a lie

One of my most hated tropes is the “catfight” trope.

It’s the age-old stereotype of women fighting with each other – often viciously – or sabotaging each other, usually to win over a man. Ugh. ?

Often this also plays out in their careers, reinforcing the idea that there’s not enough space for more than one woman at the table and that we’re all in constant competition with each other. Double ugh. ??

Growing up in the 80s and 90s, this trope was everywhere: in my beloved TV dramas Dallas and Dynasty, or the manufactured “feud” between Brittany and Christina, and of course, on every single reality TV show…

I’ve even encountered this trope in my own business after I had just run a retreat for a group of 14 amazing women. Someone (a man, unsurprisingly) responded along the lines of “Meow! I bet you get a lot of fighting with so many women”.

WTF? ?

It made me really angry, and not only because it’s such a sexist cliché.

But my own lived reality of working exclusively with women for the past 7 years could not be more different from this stale trope.

What I’ve witnessed since starting the DNG community and The Lab is endless collaboration, support and true friendships being built. Proper allyship.

And this is in a business setting that one could expect to be extra competitive.

But every single day, I see women sharing their skills, their time, and their resources with each other. Referring clients, giving feedback, cheering each other on, and believing in each other (even when we don’t believe in ourselves).

That’s why I am glad to see the catfight trope slowly disappearing from pop culture (RIP) and being replaced with a better representation of women supporting each other like in some of my favourite shows and books. (Grace & Frankie, Ted Lasso, or Parks & Rec etc)

2. There’s no way to please everyone – it’s not personal

A few years ago when I lived in Las Palmas, I remember meeting my friend for lunch at a cafe one day. She’d been working there that morning and when I arrived she looked up from her screen, eyes wide, mouth slightly agape and said to me “how the f*ck are you not shaking with rage right now?”

I said “huh? why should I be?” before she showed me her screen that was open on my Facebook Group, and I realised she’d just witnessed me virtually de-escalate a heated discussion (ok, a full-blown argument) between a few members. “Oh, that! That’s not a big deal.”

And it’s true, I don’t want to toot my own horn, but over the last 7 years I have developed a sort of “diplomacy superpower”. I can’t fly or turn invisible, but I am really really good at diffusing a tricky situation in an online community – without my blood coming to an immediate boil.

Now, I’m not naturally a super chill person, more of a hot head really, and it took me a good few years to develop this skill.

But one of the things I had to learn early on is that no matter how hard you try, there’s absolutely no way to make everyone happy.

It’s completely inevitable when you work with human beings. Especially if it’s a large group of humans. And especially taking into account language barriers and cultural differences in a global community.

Sometimes I get things wrong, sometimes I have a bad day, and sometimes they have a bad day.

Trouble will happen, and that’s ok. And there’s no point taking it personally.

3. Rules are good, values are better

It might be inevitable for trouble to arise once in a while, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to avoid or mitigate it.

Thankfully I implemented quite strict rules in my community from the very beginning.

At first, I worried that people might find this silly or unnecessary and I used to joke that this is my “German Jenny” alter-ego implementing all these rules.

But I learned that people actually welcomed these rules because they understood that I created them to make sure they have a great experience in our space.

Over the years, I tweaked and expanded the rules, and as my brand and my confidence grew, I realised that all of our rules were actually guided by my own and DNG’s brand values, right from the beginning.

For example, our very first group rule is this: “Before posting, ask yourself the following: Does this post benefit anyone else than just myself? If yes, please share it. If not, don’t post it, we won’t approve it”

I could have instead made a very detailed list of all the different topics or posts that are not allowed (and I did do that in the past) but instead, I put trust in my community members to make this decision themselves.

It shows them that we know they’re adults and can think for themselves while also reminding them that a community is about both giving and taking and that there isn’t always a cookie-cutter solution or answer to each problem.

I’ve had so much positive feedback on our guidelines, both in the FB Group as well as in The Lab.

And for such a large community, real trouble occurs incredibly rarely, despite our quite small team of admins.

I believe this is due to our really clear brand values and that I’ve demonstrated those from day 1.

4. You never stop learning (aka “am I a bad feminist?”)

When I started DNG I had sooo much fun! It was all a big experiment, I was meeting new people, and learning so much every day.

But as the community grew, so did the pressure of making sure it was a friendly and safe space for women from all over the world.

I felt totally unqualified for this – my main issue at the time was that I felt like I didn’t know enough about feminism. “Who am I to run a women’s group?” kept running through my head.

I felt terrible when someone complained about the name “digital nomad girls” – should I have called it women? It was too late to change it as within a few months lots of new female-focused groups popped up, but I also liked our name – did that make me a “bad feminist”?

Others didn’t like that my logo was pink. I felt I needed to justify myself, pink was my favourite colour, that’s why I picked it. Did that make me a “bad feminist”? (quick book recommendation: I’ve since read “Feminists don’t wear pink – and other lies” which was very helpful).

Every time I bumped against a new thing I felt I was unqualified for I first panicked, and then did what I always do: I researched, I learned, I asked my members what they thought, and we had a conversation.

And so slowly but surely, as the community grew, so did I.

I learned more about feminism, learned what intersectionality meant, and learned the language I needed to have difficult conversations.

The more I learned, the more my confidence grew too and I started using my own voice, to bring up things that mattered to me, that I thought were missing from the conversation in the digital nomad world. Topics like hustle culture, toxic productivity, climate change, the cult of celebrity in online business, and more.

To this day, I continue to learn from and with my community and I am so grateful for this.

5. Ask don’t guess

One of the first things I learned is that you have no idea what your community needs or wants. You know what you need and you know why you started the community, but that is it.

Beyond that, the only way to find out what your community wants is to ask them – don’t guess.

I learned this very early on when I started hosting local DNG meetups in Chiang Mai.

They were so fun, we’d meet for tapas or wine or street food, and I usually snapped a pic and share it in the FB Group the next day. Immediately I got comments from girls around the world “we want to host a meetup too! Is there one in Brazil/Spain/Bali?”

So I went ahead and offered my members an easy way to host their own DNG meetup. I set it all up for them (it was totally free), created an event in the group and then they could hang out with members locally. It was awesome.

But after a few months of this, people started saying “Well Jenny, the meetups are fun but they’re too short. Can you organise a longer retreat kind of meetup for us?”

Uhm. Ok. I had no idea how to organise or run a retreat but it sounded incredibly fun, so I went ahead and did it. Just over a year after starting DNG, I hosted 14 women from 10 countries for a weeklong retreat in Spain. It was epic.

Without asking and listening to my community I would have never thought of running a retreat but it was one of the best things I’ve ever done.

“Ask, don’t guess” has become a mantra for me in all aspects of life and my business.

6. “Serving” vs “monetising” a community

I might have not known that DNG would become my business when I started it, but other people figured out quite early that I was building something valuable.

I’ve received a tonne of (unsolicited) advice from strangers on the internet about how I should “monetise my community” and that I’m “leaving money on the table”. Ugh, don’t even get me started. ?

I hate the phrase “monetising your community” because it completely misses the point. A community isn’t a warm audience, patiently waiting to be sold to. They’re real people, not numbers.

Sadly, “community” has become a total buzzword and people use it interchangeably with “audience”. But the two are not the same at all.

Here’s how community expert Stephanie Baiocchi explains the difference:

“An audience is a group of people who consume your content, independent of one another. […] they may or may not have a relationship with each other.”

“A community goes beyond simply the group or number of people experiencing your brand on their own. It brings them together in one place for a shared experience.

It takes the one-way nature of talking to your audience and turns it into a dynamic, multi-way conversation among people.

Your community members are aware of one another and engage in conversation. They become a resource for each other and, as your community grows and matures, the members feel part of something bigger than themselves.

A community is a living, breathing entity.“

The people who told me to “monetise” DNG were looking at it only through the lens of conversions. And interestingly, none of them actually had anything of value to sell to my community, that always seemed like an afterthought to them.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s morally bad to offer something to your community to buy. (more on that below).

But if a community is a “living, breathing entity” then I believe it should be treated with respect, kindness and honesty.

I only started thinking of DNG as my potential future business when my own members asked me to create something for them (a retreat).

I didn’t have something to sell and then found people to sell it to. I brought them together based on shared values and experiences, and then they told me what they needed – so I created it for them.

That’s the difference between “monetising your community” and “serving your community”

(btw, it would still take a good few years before I actually earned enough money from DNG to live off. It was most definitely not an overnight success)

7. You need help & boundaries

I’ve known from day one that it’s not possible to run a community by myself.

I’ve had wonderful admins, some of which have helped run DNG for many years. Including my mum who is my OG “unpaid intern” and who cares about DNG possibly even more than I do.

But knowing that you need help and asking for help is not the same thing. And truly accepting help is another thing altogether.

If I could change one thing it’s that I wish I’d have asked for more help from the beginning. In all areas: admin, moral support, content creation, partnerships – and also financially.

Even before I started turning DNG into a business, I spent hours every day on it, I really loved my community, meeting new people everyday, chatting to women from all over the world.

It didn’t feel like work at all. But that’s the problem.

I was still freelancing almost full-time to earn money and then started organising and running retreats on top of everything, which took a huge amount of energy and time and left less space for client work.

It was simply not sustainable.

But by the time I decided to focus on turning DNG into a business, I had set a precedence of creating content, running events, hosting workshops, sending job newsletters, etc – all for free.

And after a while, people take this for granted and it gets harder to ask for help, not only financially.

I struggled with this for years and have notoriously undercharged for everything I ever launched.

(like €400 for a weeklong retreat including accommodation, and even then, some people complained that it was too much) ?

I asked for way too little money, but because I was charging money at all, I didn’t feel comfortable anymore asking for voluntary help either. So I got into this weird spiral of thinking I had to do it all myself.

I think I could have saved myself a lot of heartache if I’d asked for help, established boundaries and acknowledged the value I was creating sooner.

I always say the entrepreneurial journey is not a solo trip. I wish I had taken my own medicine and asked for (and accepted) help before nearly burning out.

Wrap Up

This blog post ended up being much longer than I anticipated and much more personal too. It felt really healthy reflecting and sharing this with you, and I hope you found this helpful or at least interesting.

Last but definitely not least, I want to thank you for being part of the DNG Community – whether you’ve been around since the start or just stumbled upon this blog today. It means the world to me and I can not wait to see what the next 7 years will bring.

I hope to bump into you somewhere in the world, or on Zoom, soon!

If you want to help…

If you’ve enjoyed being part of the DNG community, enjoy reading my newsletter or found value in what I create here, then I would love your help too.

Here’s how:

Sign up to my weekly newsletter – I write a personal letter every Friday where I share glimpses of what it’s really like to run an online business as a globally-minded woman. I also share jobs from the community and a sprinkle of inspiration. And if you love it, forward it to a friend!

If you want to support DNG financially, but are not interested or able to join us in The Lab, then you can become a cheerleader on Patreon. It’ll help me keep the community going strong for the next 7 years.

And if you want to connect on a deeper level with me and our members, then come join us in The Lab, our virtual community for experimentation, collaboration & accountability! We’re in business, together.