From The Comfort Of Your Home

I was reading this month’s issue of BC Business magazine and came across a nice story on Matt Mickiewicz. Matt is the co-founder of Sitepoint, a publisher of digital and printed content for web developers and webmaster around the world. Sitepoint Forums is one of two webmaster’s forum that I visit on a daily basses.

I had always known that Sitepoint was based in Melbourne, Australia. However, I wasn’t aware that its 22 year old (23 next month) co-founder lives just 30 minutes away from me. Apparently, Matt and his partner decided that Sitepoint would be based in Melbourne instead of BC because costs are lower (and his partner lives in Melbourne). While Matt works out of his Port Moody apartment, Sitepoint Melbourne has a “real” office with 17 employees.

The common notion that a home-based business owner is a semi-employed person working on a glorified hobby for an income that’s half of a “real job” salary doesn’t apply in the Internet era. It certainly does not apply to Matt. Sitepoint does $250,000 a month in revenues. It has a world wide user base, yet Matt runs it from the comfort of his home.

The fact that Matt is able to run Sitepoint from across the ocean is a testament to the freedom the internet brings you – you are not bounded by any one location. This has to be one of the biggest advantages to running a content based website. My friend Carl wanted a change of pace from Vancouver and now runs his sites from Hong Kong.

It doesn’t matter where I am in the world. As long as I have internet access, I can update my sites, and make money. This also have some very neat tax advantages. If I feel Canada is taxing me too much, I can “Be Like Carl” and leave for more tax friendly locals. However, since I recently purchased this house, I think I’ll stay in Vancouver for a little while longer.