I Met My Biggest Online Hater in Real Life.

Ten years ago, when working online, and traveling the world as a digital nomad was still a new concept, there was a doubt planted in people's minds if it was all a scam or not.  I was the target of a lot of that discussion, as I was the founder of the Nomad Summit, which was the first ever conference for digital nomads, and the first one publicly talking about how great being a digital nomad in Chiang Mai, Thailand was. 

Personally I was also very vocal and transparent about how I was earning money online while living aboard. I talked about how cheap rent and costs of living were, while showing how much I was earning and that I was able to save and invest 70% or more of my monthly earnings each month doing so. Prior to starting ILAB with Sam, I had the Travel Like a Boss Podcast where I interviewed digital nomads and asked them about how they made money online. 

Without exaggeration or boasting, my content, events, and conference was directly or at least partially responsible for popularizing the digital nomad trend of moving to Thailand and later Bali back in the early days. But with thousands of new nomads coming, there was both good and bad as a result of it. Some online haters like this guy I ended up meeting at my buddy's wedding a few days ago started hating on me online, through nomad and local Facebook groups, and basically calling me a scammer, or even calling the entire digital movement a scam. Jon Scales was one of those haters. Funny thing is, that I had completely forgotten about him, and never would had recognized him if he didn't come up to me at my friend's wedding to introduce himself.  

It took me a few minutes to even rewind that far back, as I haven't lived in Chiang Mai almost a decade, but then it all came back and I instantly recognized his name and remembered what he had written about me. I told him that he's lucky I'm over it as if this was ten years ago, I would had smacked him. (and by smacked, it probably would had been a proper Muay Thai beating of his ass to be honest.)The craziest part is when I asked him what he's been up to since, and he said that he finally gave the thing he was hating on a proper try doing covid, as he was stuck at home with nothing to do, and it actually worked and made him a lot of money.  

Even though he was one of the loudest voices calling drop shipping a scam and warned everyone now to do it, he ended up doing it himself by selling cat scratching posts and made a small fortune doing it. 

I asked him if he ever made a follow-up post saying he was wrong, and that it actually works, but he basically responded, in a way suggesting "who scares about them, I did it and now I'm rich." 

He used the money he made drop shipping to build a luxury villa 25 minutes outside of Chiang Mai that he now rents out for events at $1,000 a night.

I  tired to lecture him on how his negativity online and spreading of rumors not only hurt me personally, as well as my reputation but it prevented others from potentially creating their own businesses or even getting started. 

To be fair, I knew that there were a bunch of people in Bali who had zero experience of their own, who started teaching people how to drop ship from Ali-express, instead of actually sourcing legitimate suppliers. Not unlike the typical Bali gurus or coaches who instead of doing anything successful for themselves first and then maybe going into coaching, they just skip the first part and become a life coach or business coach. 

But I told him I was so transparent that I ever offered publicly for anyone to come by the coworking space I was at daily to look over my shoulder and verify for themselves whatever they wanted. I even gave the name of my tax accountant and offered to go over my tax returns if they really wanted to. 

A few people took me up on it, but it didn't stop guys like Jon from hating online without ever meeting me in person, or taking me up on my offer. 

I moved on as I eventually sold both of my drop shipping stores, and got tired of helping others start theirs, especially since I ended up getting screwed out of a partner store that I helped two guys start that took longer than originally planned to start making money, but eventually turned around and was a success. 

I've always said from day one that yes, there are scammers out there promoting shitty drop shipping courses. Usually by guys selling crap off of aliexpress in Bali. That was never me. 

But it was hard to explain and prove myself as I needed to be secretive and protect my niche. But now that it's been 10 years and my NDA is officially long over, here's it is! 

I was an authorized dealer for a company called Earthlite which makes the best massage tables in the USA. Portable massage tables was a great niche as you can't really find them locally in big box stores (target, Walmart, etc) or even at Costco and professionals didn't want to order off of Amazon because they required a bit of specific industry knowledge.

I also sold hundreds of them to Hawaii as Amazon refused to ship there as it was too expensive to do so on Prime and just decided not to at all. 

All in all, I had over a thousand satisfied customers who would come to my site, find the exact one they needed with info that other sites didn't provide, then I'd have Earthlite dropship it directly to the customer with Fedex Ground in 2-3 business days. It was a great business that made me  $80,636 in profit plus the sale price of the store at $60,000 giving me $138,271 total just for that first store I had started. 

I no longer have anything to do with drop shipping, Anton's course, or any of that, so don't ask me what's a good niche now or if it's too late, or whatever, as I honestly have no idea. But I wanted to share this bit of knowledge and this story today. 

The money I made from running the stores, the exit from them, as well as the side money I made as an affiliate of Anton's course, Shopify, coaching others, as well as my other online businesses were the reason I had the baseline to invest and buy my properties. 

The funniest part is that a few hours later, he came back up to me to flex. He has been living an extremely flashy lifestyle and showing it off on tik-tok ever since making money from the store, buying a few flashy cars, and then the villa. 

He probably assumed I was broke since I don't live a flashy lifestyle like he does, and I never show off my money.  Or maybe he assumed that all digital nomads from Chiang Mai are broke and that somehow he was the only one who got lucky. 

Either way, wanted to measure dicks and wanted to compare our bank accounts and I was genuinely curious how much he has, as in my experience, the flashiest people aren't often the wealthiest ones. 

He opened his account first, big smile, big grin, and extremely proud to show he had six figures in there, $111,700 usd. He eagerly waited for my account to open, go through the 2-factor security check, Face ID, to see a number quite a bit higher than his. 

It took him a few moments of pause, his eyes dropped, his whole world crashed around him, then he said, "fair play." and walked off disheartened. Then very randomly, immediately started proudly introducing me to others including his wife. 

Lesson learned? Not all that screams loudly, either good or bad, can be trusted. Trust your own gut, then verify. 

-Johnny FD