Your Customers Are the Ones Who Became Location Independent

Location independent does not mean you can work from anywhere. Let me take that definition away first, because it is the half that gets sold, and the less useful one.

You are going to need a real computer — not a phone, not a tablet. You are going to need genuinely fast internet, because you will be uploading video, and upload speed is the thing that turns a twenty-minute task into an afternoon. You are going to need somewhere to record that does not sound like a hotel bathroom and does not have laundry visible behind you.

None of that is compatible with a beach. It is entirely compatible with living wherever you like, which is a different claim and a better one.

What is actually true about the work

You can run this from any home, in any town, in any state. I have lived in several parts of the country and now live in Colorado, chosen for fishing rather than for proximity to anything professional. That is real freedom and it is worth having.

You can also genuinely operate it from your phone for short stretches — I have run a business from a phone on holiday more than once. Answering customers, checking the numbers, posting something. It works fine.

What you cannot do from the phone is build. The production work — recording, editing, writing, setting things up — needs the desk. So the accurate version is: you can live anywhere and run it from anywhere, and you will still need a room somewhere with a computer in it.

Plan for the room. It is a smaller constraint than a clinic lease and it is not nothing.

The half that matters

Now the part I actually want you to take from this.

Think about the business you would have opened instead. A practice, a consultancy, a clinic. Its market is a circle drawn around a building. Every customer you will ever have is somebody willing to travel to that address, which means your total addressable market is a function of local population and how far people will drive.

A course business has no address. Your product is sold nationwide from the first day, which means your market is everybody in your profession, everywhere, rather than everybody in your profession within thirty miles.

That is the change worth understanding, and your lifestyle is not what it touches. It is about the size of the pool.

It is also what makes a narrow idea viable. A problem affecting a small percentage of your profession is a hopeless basis for a local practice — there are not enough of those people near you. Spread across an entire country, the same small percentage is a real audience. Specialising, which would be commercially reckless in a physical business, becomes the sensible move.

What follows from that

Two practical consequences, which you can act on this week.

Stop thinking locally when you pick the problem. Your instinct will be to choose something common enough that plenty of people around you have it. That instinct is calibrated for a business with a catchment area and you no longer have one. Choose the sharper, narrower problem.

Build for a national audience from the start. The entity does not need to live in your state. You do not need a local license, because there is nothing local about it. Your content should speak to your profession rather than to your region, and your examples should not assume anyone shares your local rules.

The honest summary

You get to live where you want. That is genuine and it is pleasant and it is not why this business works.

It works because a recorded course reaches everybody in your field regardless of where either of you is standing — which turns a small, specific piece of professional knowledge into something with enough buyers to be worth building.

Get the desk sorted. Then stop thinking about where you are and start thinking about how many of them there are.