If you’ve been following us from the beginning of our journey into this freedom-filled lifestyle (since 2008!), you’ll know that we didn’t start off as coaches, bloggers, creators, or business owners.
We were just two, 24-year-old budget backpackers with 65L packs, a dream of travel and freedom, and no idea where it would all lead.
If you don’t know our story… here it is from 2008 to now:
Back in 2008, we quit our jobs in Canada, sold our condominium, our vehicle, and basically everything we owned. We swapped a 9-5 at a corporate office and graveyard shifts at a packaging plant, for one-way tickets to Southeast Asia and a life of total freedom on the road.
After that first taste of travel, we were hooked. We knew we wanted to build a life around travel…we just had to figure out how.
Now, here we are 17 years later…more than 80 countries visited, and residents of Bulgaria. Along the way, we’ve built 4 businesses, and created 4 online courses.
We’ve taught over 1,000 people how to launch their own personal brands…and 50 people have personally been coached by us.
This is the story of how we went from budget backpackers to personal brand coaches, and how Goats On The Road grew, shifted, and reinvented itself over more than a decade online.
The Backpacker Era (2008 – 2012)
Let’s rewind a bit here. All the way back to 2008.
Like I said, we had quit our jobs and we were backpacking around the world – living on $30 a day at one point.
We’d sleep in bamboo huts, ride on the roofs of buses (not recommended!), and document our journey on a free blog platform and Facebook for our family and friends back home.
During those years, we backpacked all around Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and couple of places in Europe. The longer we stayed on the road, the more we fell in love with the lifestyle.
But, we had one slight problem…our money was running out!
We didn’t want to return home. We were terrified that one day we’d have to go back to our normal jobs.
And so when the money did start running out… I actually ended up having a meltdown on the beach in the Philippines.
Being on the road had become our lifestyle and I couldn’t envision myself working back in Canada in an office, under florescent lighting all day.
We needed to figure something out. And fast.
So, we regrouped and dove head-first into figuring out a way to make money on the road doing something we loved.
The Remote Era (2012 – 2015)
During that time on the road, we realized we didn’t want to just travel. We wanted to earn an income abroad and build a lifestyle around freedom – to become digital nomads … keep in mind… this was before the term “Digital Nomad” was even a thing!
I remember it like it was yesterday, we stopped in at dark internet cafe in Delhi, India. The kind of place we’d go to get a wired internet connection (this was back before hotels and hostels even had wifi, and we didn’t have a smartphone).
It cost around $1 per hour of (very slow) internet.
I searched “how to make money for travel” and up popped a blog post by, Johnny Ward of OneStep4Ward. He said he was making $1,500 a month from his blog!
I turned to Nick: “Can you figure out how to build a website?!”
And so it began!
We ended up teaching ourselves WordPress and basic coding so we could build our website and brand “Goats On The Road” – which we started in February, 2012 from a beach hut on the island of Koh Phangan in Thailand.
We shared our travel stories, how-to’s, photos, and videos on our blog, YouTube channel, and Facebook page.
We didn’t know it then, but this was the beginning of our personal brand.
While we were building up Goats On The Road, we taught English in China for a year to supplement our income. And while we enjoyed that era of our lives, teaching English was only a stepping stone for us – we knew we weren’t going to work for someone else after that.
Once we started creating our website, writing content and networking with other bloggers (there were only a handful of us!), we realized we really enjoyed it. We had a feeling this could have potential and we knew this would be our way to make money on the road.
We’d be our own boss, make our own schedule, and continue our dream of travel and the unconventional lifestyle we’d been leading.
The Growth Era (2016 – 2018)
Sharing online is one thing, but to turn our personal stories into an actual business, we needed real skills. So, we expanded our skillset and spent a lot of time researching and investing in courses & elearning.
We learned SEO (search engine optimization) and were even asked to speak about it on podcasts, and at virtual events…and eventually, we created a course around it.
We also learned email marketing and the power of social media, and of course, we continued with storytelling – something we’d been doing since 2008.
We kept showing up online, networking, learning and sharing. And slowly…momentum happened and it was like a snowball rolling down a hill, gathering speed and growing as it went!
Our brand started earning real money through advertising and affiliate marketing.
And, since Goats On The Road was well-known, with a loyal audience, and lots of visitors coming to our website each month (500,000 people/month 🤯)…tourism boards and companies flew us around the world to tell stories about their destinations and services.
It was surreal!
Our vision for creating a lifestyle of freedom through our own business, while sharing with others and doing something we loved was coming true.
The little blog we built from a rickety beach hut had turned into our full-time income.
The Education Era (2018 – 2019)
With the business growing, we felt the next pull: teach others how to do what we do. This is what we’ve always done – we do, we master (or try to), then we teach it.
So, we evolved again.
We became so passionate about blogging, SEO and building a personal brand, that we wanted to share it with the world. We couldn’t believe more people weren’t doing it!
So we started to share about how to start blogs, grow with SEO, and build personal brands. We shared about how to teach English abroad, get freelance jobs, and build online income streams.
If we’d learned it and lived it…we shared it and taught it.
Our SEO course was our first real paid course and the goal was to help others start and grow online brands of their own. More than 1,000 people joined our courses, and the feedback was incredible.
(In case you’re curious: Unfortunately, we stopped selling the SEO course at the end of 2023. We feel that SEO has been taken over by AI and doesn’t have a future, so we don’t want to teach it if it’s not a viable business anymore.)
Little by little, our students started emailing us and telling us they were earning enough money to quit jobs they didn’t love.
They were making a side-income so they had extra money while at home, and/or, they were travelling full-time from the earnings of their brands!
Receiving those messages was the moment it really sank in for us… that something we created could actually help someone else’s life in a meaningful way.
It shifted everything. It wasn’t about us anymore, and that realization genuinely humbled us.
Seeing numbers on a screen is one thing…like pageviews, followers, and analytics.
But then, when people start emailing and saying they’d taken our courses and made enough money to quit jobs they’d been wanting to leave for years….
… that meant the world to us.
Those years were a whirlwind. Our website was growing, our courses were doing well, and our little corner of the internet was helping people build new lives.
It felt bigger than anything we expected when we first started out with backpacks and a dream.
But then, the world shifted…
The Industry Shift (2020 – 2022)
These couple of years were a challenge for everyone. But, I’m focusing on our travel industry in particular.
A global pandemic paused all travel…and businesses related to travel really suffered during this time. With that, many of our affiliate partnerships dropped off – meaning our income took a nosedive.
On top of that, Google rolled out devastating updates which meant that our website wasn’t showing up online like before.
New short-form video platforms became popular (TikTok), which meant that attention was moving from blogs to quick videos. Then came ChatGPT and a flood of AI tools.
Everything changed overnight!
We quickly realized that this wasn’t just another trend… things were changing and we had to pivot if we wanted to keep doing this job we love.
We had to evolve again.
Most people panicked, and so did we for a bit, but our panic didn’t last long. We had built numerous skills over the years and could pivot. We just didn’t know how at first – then it hit us.
Diversifying our Income
With travel at a standstill, and no one searching for travel related things, we decided to create two new brands around two topics that weren’t related to travel.
The topics were two of Nick’s passions: fly fishing and guitars.
We were nervous to start something new, but let’s be honest, we had a lot of time on our hands!
We built up a website, Instagram, YouTube channel and email list for the fly fishing website, and for the guitar/string instrument website, that was mostly just a review site and didn’t have a social media presence.
Within just a couple of months, we saw growth with the fly fishing brand. This was definitely exciting and gave us the push to keep going.
During this time, we also pivoted Goats On The Road to focus more on the remote work and ways to make money online side of things, rather than focusing on the travel aspect of our brand.
And it started growing again.
We also started spending more on social media, email, and YouTube. Effectively diversifying our business across more platforms than just the blog.
During this period, we learned the hard way that platforms can collapse. Algorithms can change. Affiliates can come and go. World events can effect everything. Entire business models can disappear.
But there was an upside and positive takeaway to our experience: we remembered that our personal brand, our story, our skills, and our knowledge are things that no platform or pandemic can touch.
The Coaching Era (2023 – Present)
Towards the end of 2023 and start of 2024, we felt the online world as we knew it was about to completely change. For better or worse, AI was here to stay, and video was (is) the medium of choice.
Ironically, 2023 was our best year ever financially. But we still felt like there was a shift coming.
So instead of clinging to what used to work (blogging & SEO), we leaned into what we were good at and what we’ve always been about: Helping people lead a freedom-filled lifestyle, while earning money doing something they love.
But this time, we wanted to have more of a connection with our audience and followers, and really provide more hands on guidance.
That’s when our next era began.
We took everything we know from over a decade of making money from what you know, building personal brands, growing social media, email marketing, and creating digital products and services…
…and turned it into a new venture: Creator Kickstarter Coaching Program. It’s a blended model with the “3 Cs”: Coaching, Course & Community. We offer live calls with us, pre-recorded course material, and a private community.
At first, we were super nervous and unsure if anyone would even be interested. What if we launched this program, but then nobody joined?! We were honestly so worried.
We had an application form, and then would hop on Discovery Calls if we felt like the person would be a good fit for the program.
Like most people feel when starting something new, we felt that imposter syndrome creep in, followed by self doubt. Who were we to teach this?!
Not to mention, doing live calls was something totally new for us and it was definitely out of our comfort zone.
It’s crazy how the mind can trick you into believing you’re not good enough – no matter how many skills, or years of experience you have.
We’ve been running the Creator Kickstarter Program and Community for almost 2 years now… and we’ve had 50 amazing people enter into our community!
We teach people what we’ve lived over the years: that freedom comes from building a business based on who you are.
We love helping people grow impactful brands that in turn, help others. Helping people help people – that’s the ripple effect. And it’s the most meaningful chapter of our journey so far.
The Future
If we’ve learned one thing over our many years in this industry, it’s that you need to be able to evolve and pivot in the online space, and most importantly: personal brands aren’t going anywhere.
And actually, the online coaching and e-learning markets are projected to grow significantly over the next 5 – 10 years…making this a massive opportunity for anyone building a personal brand and offering courses or coaching.
We’ve been feeling it for the past few years now. We’re definitely entering the biggest shift the internet has ever seen – and the people who start sharing their story now will be the ones leading the space later.
Those who build a personal brand today will be the ones with the freedom to travel, work from anywhere, and run a business that doesn’t rely on a single platform, or doesn’t get taken over by robots.
This is why we’re so passionate about showing people how to launch their brands, step by step.
As you can tell from reading this article, these past seventeen years have been a wild ride for us. We’ve adapted and reinvented our business(es) multiple times, and brought you along every step of the way.
Thank you for being here as we continue to evolve and share with you! Who knows what the next era will bring…
