A lot of people that I meet in my travels, tend to ask me how I manage to travel for 12 to 15 months at a time? How do I support myself financially? I must be coming for a wealthy family?

The truth is a combination of hard work and smart work, with proper and meticulous planning.

I was born in the US, into a single parent family and from very early stage in my life I learned to work hard for myself.

I did plenty of casual jobs as a teenager but when I got my driving license, I decided to use our family car and drive for Uber in the weekends while I was still at university learning C++, Java, Python and Swift.

Driving for Uber  

Driving for Uber was and still is a great way to make money for traveling, I got many rides from fellow students on Saturday and Sunday nights from downtown. Quite often I use to get back home with close to $250 for a 10 hours drive over the weekend.

However, driving for Uber intrigue my curiosity into mobile apps and how they are changing the landscape of the modern economy. Many people across the world are making a living or supplementing their income by driving for Uber and Lyft.

The sharing economy of Airbnb and the gig-economy are challenging the 9 to 5 stereotypes that our parents’ generation was brought up with.  

The old economy could not support a nomadic lifestyle but the new sharing economy thrives on it.

Coding apps and Uber clone script

My first apps where simple games that I sold on Freelancer and Flippa, it was nothing major like you seen on the news with the Angry Birds app or the Summly app which was bought by Yahoo on those days for more than $25.000.000.

Or even the Flappy Bird app which by the end of January 2014, it was the most downloaded free game in the App Store for iOS.

During that time, its developer said that Flappy Bird was earning him $50,000 a day from in-app advertisements as well as sales. Not bad for a free gaming app.

I was not in that league but my first apps gave me enough cash to buy myself a ticket to Asia and experience Thailand for couple of months without worrying about money. There I met more like-minded app programmers and got into designing Uber clone script for various taxi startups.

Becoming a Digital Nomad

By learning to code and learning iOS development with Swift, I can now make tailor made apps for Digital agencies and even sell directly to local taxi companies. I have managed to become a location-independent freelancer.

I have been doing this for the last 4 years, and made a reasonable income, and lived all around the world.

From a pure enjoyment and the freedom perspective, I prefer to create my own apps and make a business around it. If you are smart and driven, you can definitely make a living doing just that.

Regardless of whether you write code or designing a product, make sure that your idea solves somebody else’s problem. That is that key to successful outcome.

David, the author of “A Digital Nomad’s confession: Driving for Uber & coding Uber clone script to fund my travel” works for Smart Car Tech an innovative app design company.