![]() ![]() He paired up with Starosta in 2018, before bringing in Whitaker as a junior partner in early 2019. Louden worked for free for other dropshippers to learn the ropes. In Chiang Mai, he met a dropshipper who introduced him to remote working. He washed up in Asia three years ago, after working in Australia as a farmhand. Louden, who is 28, has the affable, languid demeanor of the well-mannered Virginia boy he is. They also have a remote team of five in the Philippines who handle customer service, as well as a project manager in India. “We may burn through a few thousand dollars before we start doing consistent sales.” Louden and his partners have five Shopify stores, selling clothing, gadgets, and household products. “We run funnels to let the Facebook algorithm figure everything out,” he says. ![]() The best dropshippers will run “funnels”: repeatedly targeting the same consumers over a period of time in order to coax them through the various stages of purchase – add to cart, enter card details, check out. Louden talks me through their strategy in a nearby coffee shop. It’s going to get, like, really bad.” Dropshipping offers these men a way to accrue wealth outside of the stultifying confines of corporate culture, and without formal qualifications – many of the dropshippers I meet are college dropouts. “But I really think if you’re poor or middle-class, you’re going to get fucked in the next 20 years. “Most of my life, I’ve never had strong ambitions to have a lot of money,” says Whitaker. Inside the city’s co-working spaces (Dojo is the oldest in Canggu, Outpost the new challenger), people are building business empires selling products they’ve never handled, from countries they’ve never visited, to consumers they’ve never met. ![]() Around us, statue-like men wander in and out of steam rooms (CrossFit is big here), talking about e-commerce and intermittent fasting. “The thing is, not many Indonesians are on a level with bule ,” explains one digital nomad over the fart of hot tub jets in Amo, a luxury spa. When not talking Facebook ads or cost-per-click, they socialise exclusively with each other. In Canggu’s cafés, barefoot westerners run fledgling companies from MacBook Pros. The town, once a stop-off for backpackers en route to Ubud’s yoga studios and hippy scene, has in recent years become a hub for self-described “digital nomads”. A local woman will massage your body, silently, for the equivalent of a few pounds. Over smoothie bowls and lattes, western immigrants – expats, as they prefer to be known – talk about themselves, loudly. The clicking of keyboards in the Balinese town’s co-working spaces is drowned out only by the roar of mopeds. Canggu is a place where people go to feel rich. ![]()
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