What you'll learn from Benjamin's story
Meet Benjamin
Hey, I’m Ben. I’m originally from Australia but I’ve spent the last year and a half living in Europe. I’ve made Paris my little home away from home but I also spend a lot of time exploring all over, with frequent trips to visit friends in London and Germany. This is all made possible by working remotely as a product manager for a tech company based back in Australia.
What I do for work
As a product manager (PM), my job is primarily about problem-solving. I work for Prosple which is a startup helping students get the best possible start to their careers through our jobs board and career resources. It’s my job to understand the students’ needs and come up with creative solutions to address their issues; whether that be introducing new features, adjusting the look of the site or improving our search algorithm. It’s an extremely creative role and also one that involves working closely with different teams such as engineers, designers and data analysts.
Salary transparency
Unfortunately Paris and London where I spend a lot of time are expensive places to live. Regarding salaries in this type of career, roles for Australian companies typically start around $70,000 AUD but they go up into the hundreds of thousands with major tech companies like Netflix, Amazon and Google paying up to half a million AUD for senior PM roles.
Join me on a typical work day
My days really depend a lot on where I am and the time zone I’m in. Since I’m in Paris at the moment, I usually start my day around 7AM which is about 3PM in Australia, which works well for syncing up with my colleagues there.
The first thing I do is check in with my team. I like to schedule all my meetings early in the morning for me before they log off. This lets me make sure they have everything they need for the following day. By 10AM these are usually out of the way so I’ll take a break, have breakfast and then get out of my apartment.
Even though I work for a remote company, I’m not a big fan of working from home. I find it too isolating and prefer a bit of buzz around me. I usually head out to a local coffee shop or specifically in Paris it’s the Hoxton Hotel which offers a bit of a co-working-like space. It’s always filled with other remote workers so it’s the perfect place to get work done around like minded people. I usually stay there for a few hours until lunchtime.
Lunchtime in Paris is a treat. I often take my lunch to a park or sit by the Seine River. After lunch, my schedule is pretty flexible. If I’m still feeling energetic, I’ll go back to the Hoxton and work for a few more hours. But also if the weather’s nice, or I’m not ready to get back into work mode, I might take an extended break to relax or get some exercise in at the gym. Especially when the sun’s out, I like to make the most of the middle of the day by exploring the city, catching up with a few friends I’ve made here and there are also heaps of really nice parks which are great to go and relax in.
If I’ve been super productive I could finish my day around 3PM but often I do prefer to break it up a bit and take my time so I more typically log off around 5PM to get started on dinner. Paris really comes alive in the evenings. After dinner I’ll smash out some more work on my personal projects, usually from a starbucks that’s open late, before taking a sunset walk around the river or more lately around Le Marais - my new favourite part of the city. Typically I’m in bed by 11PM ready to do it all again the next day.
Welcome to my “office”
Given I work remotely, it may seem strange that I don’t like working from home but there are plenty of places I find that I prefer and am more productive in. After 18 months of travelling I’ve got a few favourites across cities I frequently visit, most of them being affiliated with the Disloyalty membership program which costs me $40 AUD per month but provides me unlimited access to their hotel working spaces and a daily coffee.
Apart from these hotel co-working spaces, I love working from coffee shops and libraries but I have been known to my team to work from airports and trains too.
My Life Outside of Work
Outside of work, I spend my time exploring wherever I am. In Paris, I never find it boring to take a long walk, especially with an audiobook or some music playing. I’m also trying to learn French, so I make a point to practise whenever I can.
My travels aren’t limited to Paris, though. I spend a lot of time in London and Germany too. I have a good friend in Germany, and when I stay with them, we’re always exploring nearby places, skiing in Switzerland and Austria during the winter, roadtripping into Italy over summer or just staying back and playing tennis. Summers in Europe are especially wonderful. I usually relocate somewhere coastal, like the French Riviera or a Greek island, to enjoy swimming and relaxing by the sea. It’s all about finding a balance between work and enjoying life.
One of my most memorable travel highlights was in 2023 when I spent six weeks in Greece, mostly in Mykonos and Athens, soaking in the vibrant culture and stunning scenery. This year, I’m planning to visit another island near Athens called Poros as well as spend a month back on the French Riviera near Nice to make the most of the perfect weather.
Finding my home away from home
Organising accommodation can be a bit of a challenge, especially for longer trips. I mostly use Airbnb and make the most of the 28 day discount a lot of places offer.
Another great option is co-livings. They're sort of like hostels, but specifically for remote workers. While hostels can be very party-focused with younger crowds packed into dorms of 20 people, co-livings offer private rooms or shared spaces with one or two other people. They're typically in nice areas with lots of activities nearby, and they attract digital nomads from all over the world.
I remember being in Berlin in January, it was freezing and miserable. I decided I needed a change, somewhere sunny and pleasant, so I found this co-living place called Sun and Co near Valencia in Spain. It was super cheap, like €700 for the whole month. I saw some videos, read some reviews, and it looked amazing, so I booked a flight and went down there. I ended up meeting half a dozen people who, a year and a half later, are still really good friends. We check in with each other every so often, despite being in different countries. One's in South Korea, another in Belgium, and another is travelling around South America.
The place in Valencia was absolutely incredible, beautiful spot, really nice house, and they vet the people pretty well. You’re definitely going to be around like-minded individuals. Another co-living I want to check out is in the French Alps called Cloud Citadel which was recommended by a friend I met in the Spanish co-living. It's quite a bit more expensive, but you can stay over winter, and it’s a ski-in, ski-out mansion in the Alps. I’m idealising the lifestyle of mixing work with skiing for a month.
My journey into remote working
In summary, it was a lot of hard work, but even more luck and it's certainly not your typical story, although I'm not sure if there is a typical story for getting into a lifestyle like this.
There's some key backstory to how I got to where I am today so I need to go back to my time at university for it to make sense. After finishing high school I landed a scholarship to live at St. Mark's College in Adelaide. You can kind of think of it as the student accommodation that you see in American movies of students at college except it’s a separate entity to the university. You have your own room, but share bathrooms and there are tennis courts, a library and all meals provided. The scholarship I was on was tied to my academic performance so there was a lot of incentive for me to do well at university. The college also had an academic support program run by a lady named Rachel who I naturally got quite close to.
Later when I graduated with my bachelors in corporate finance, I managed to land an offer to join Deloitte as a risk consultant but I quickly discovered working in an office all day wasn’t appealing to me. Don't get me wrong, financial security and career progression were extremely important to me but I felt like I was wasting my twenties away thinking "is this all there is to life?".
During this time and for a few years prior, I had been following a few Youtubers Jon Ollson and Benjamin Otega, who made content about their life travelling through Europe, surfing, skiing and making money from their laptop. It was the perfect representation of an unrealistic social media lifestyle but I was completely hooked and it further added to my unsatisfaction towards how my own life was turning out.
After a few months Rachel reached out to me to check in and I admitted that things weren’t going as well as I had hoped. I mentioned earlier that luck played a big role for me and this is where it struck again. Rachel introduced me to a guy named Jeff who happened to be a co-founder of Prosple, you can probably see where I’m going with this now.
Over several months, Jeff mentored me and pointed me towards potential careers. I was naturally quite overwhelmed at this point having realised the thing I’d studied for the last three years wasn’t what I wanted to do.
I decided to go part-time at Deloitte for the last few months, which gave me more time to figure out my path. I remember I set a rule for myself that I had to use my time off during the week to work on something productive and not just waste it. I didn’t know where I was headed but I told myself that progress in any direction was better than staying still and so I started researching careers and learning skills like web development, blogging and copywriting.
Fast forward another few months I had the bare bones of a product, a resource to help international students prepare for interviews, I named it Prepin. I didn’t even have a website but I shared it with Jeff, to show what I’d been working on and by chance he was about to give a presentation to students at St Marks College on that very topic. He suggested I give the presentation with him and after it went well he made me an offer to join Prosple and the rest was history.
Looking back, it was the perfect example of Steve Jobs’ quote: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” At the time, I didn’t know how everything would fit together, but I trusted that it would. Every new skill I learned and every person I met contributed to my journey, eventually leading me to the position at Prosple.
Going all in on remote work
I mentioned the story about the YouTubes earlier because that was kind of my introduction to remote work. They showed me it was possible but until I joined Prosple I thought you had to be an influencer or own your own company to make money online like that. Prosple though didn’t have an office so when I joined, the whole team was spread out across mostly Australia and South East Asia. This was during Covid so travelling overseas wasn’t a possibility yet but after a short trip to Melbourne (a nearby city), I realised that there was no difference between me working there compared to working in Adelaide where I was from. That was when the possibilities of where I could take this started to sink in, the lifestyle I had seen on social media was suddenly possible so as soon as borders opened I booked a one way flight to London and took just 5 days of leave to start my European adventure.
My message to the world
Finding your passion can be a challenging journey, but it’s essential to keep moving forward, even if you’re not entirely sure where you’re headed. The first step is to evaluate if you’re genuinely happy with what you’re doing now. If the answer is no, look ahead at the people in your company who are five to ten years in front of you. Are they happy? Are they living a lifestyle you want? If not, it’s a clear sign that you need to make a change.
It's crucial to put yourself in a position to be lucky. Luck often comes from years of hard work, building a reputation, meeting people, and sharing your goals. For example, Rachel, who oversaw the academic program at St. Mark’s College, where I stayed, introduced me to Jeff, the co-founder of Prosple who ultimately gave me my big break . This connection only happened because I had built a solid reputation and shared my ambitions openly.
Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. I personally didn’t have much fear of rejection because I knew I didn’t want to stay where I was. But often people only take action when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of change. Embrace the discomfort and know that you are always only a single decision or event away from something that could completely change your life.
What’s next for me?
Looking ahead, I plan to explore more of Southeast Asia, especially the Philippines. I enjoy city life, with Paris being my favourite, but more and more I also see the appeal of a beachfront villa somewhere tropical. Career-wise, I’m still early in my journey at 24 years old so I plan to stay with Prosple, continuing to learn more about how world class products are built and businesses are run and ultimately build something of my own further down the track.
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