Not a vacation (mostly)
Before I left I said this wasn't a holiday, and I know I said, that it's not a self-finding trip either.
Truth: It was a little bit of the latter, why pretend otherwise. The six to eight months before I hopped on that plane were dominated by insanity and pathological individual(s). Maybe one day when TIA hits 100’000 followers I do a story time, I promise it is well worth the wait.
Truth: Work really did come with me.
A normal day
I wake up relatively late, around nine, and work from the apartment first. Then I pack the laptop and head to a coffee shop (not always the same one) and work some more. After that it's errands and enjoying the city, whether that's Da Nang or Bangkok.
Evenings go one of two ways: drinks with a friend, or more work from a 24-hour coffee shop. On weekdays I start on research around seven in the evening and trade from about half past, with projects running in parallel, until 2:30 or so in the morning. Then back to the apartment. Weekends, no trading.
The trading isn't big, but I enjoy it, and sometimes it helps pay for a dinner or a small day out :-)
(No, I'm not on a beach all day. Sorry to disappoint.)
One of the things I built
I've spent a lot of my working life in retail. Plenty of online stores get the visitors and not the orders, and some of the reasons are right there on the home page. In Narvar's 2025 survey of 3,461 US online shoppers, nine in ten said they check the return policy before they buy. It surprised me, and triggered an idea.
So I built something. A free store scan: put in your store's URL and an email, and a minute or two later you get a score out of 100, the biggest leaks it can see, and roughly the financial impact of it. In part lead gen? Sure, but nobody is going to call you 5 minutes after using the tool, and not just because I don’t collect phone numbers. I’d rather have someone tell me if it was useful and how to make it better than sell them a service.
Before it went out I tested it on ten real, well-known online stores. Four of them had no link to the returns policy, the shipping policy, or both, on the home page.
If you run an online store, try it on yours. I'd love to hear what it finds for you.
So that's what "not a vacation" looks like. The work came with me, like I said it would.
Don't be shy, say hi if you're in the area! Right now that’d be Bangkok.
