Remote Rebellion & Digital Entrepreneurship with Michelle Coulson
Michelle didn't plan Remote Rebellion. She planned to surf in Bali and keep her recruitment job. When her employer told her the London office was reopening and she needed to come back, she quit - no savings, no backup, a mortgage in London, and no clear next step. That was the rebellion the brand is named after.
Finding remote work turned out to be harder than she expected, even in 2021 when the job market was hot. Roles advertised as remote weren't always remote. Companies couldn't wrap their heads around someone based in the UK working from Bali. So she applied the same logic she'd used as a recruiter - reverse-engineered the process, targeted remote-first companies specifically, built a network intentionally - and landed three or four freelance gigs over the course of a year. People kept asking how she did it. That's when the coaching started, and eventually Remote Rebellion became the full focus.
One of the more interesting things Michelle built is an online job fair - 17 remote-first companies presenting to job seekers in a format designed to feel like a real conversation rather than a box-ticking exercise. Companies got five minutes to pitch themselves, then opened up for Q&A. The idea came from attending the Running Remote conference and noticing that job seekers and hiring companies were in the same room with no structured way to connect. Four hires came out of the first event within 60 days. The value on the employer side was something Michelle hadn't fully anticipated - companies were just as hungry for genuine human interaction as the candidates were, especially as AI interviews become more common and more widely disliked.
On international mobility, Michelle's honest about what it actually looks like. She spent 18 months after Bali testing eight countries - Mexico, Thailand, across Europe - before coming back to Bali and staying. Mexico had almost everything: sun, surf, good food, the right time zone for US clients. It just didn't feel like home. The travel itself also gets in the way of productivity more than people expect. Finding a routine, a decent gym, eating well - all of it takes effort when you're moving constantly. She's 40 this year and says she used to think routine was for boring people. She's changed her mind.
For US clients looking at Europe, she walks through the digital nomad visa landscape: Thailand's five-year visa at around $200 with a relatively low income threshold, versus the more paperwork-heavy Spanish, Portuguese, and Greek options that require several months of provable income from a company not based in that country. The through-line is that it's doable, it's just process - and you can pay someone to handle it if the admin is too much.
The entrepreneurship conversation is where Michelle gets most candid. She read The 4-Hour Workweek early on and genuinely pictured herself in a hammock. She's now running a team of seven, working 9 to 9 some days, and reflects that the cash flow piece snuck up on her - overhead that started at a few hundred dollars a month compounded quietly until it was tens of thousands. She's not a numbers person by her own admission, and she over-delegated at one point to the point where she lost track of what was happening. The lesson she'd pass on: your overhead will grow faster than you notice, and if numbers aren't your thing, you need someone whose thing it is.
Remote Rebellion works with people at two ends of the same problem - those who are just starting to think about whether remote is possible for them, and those who've been applying and hitting dead ends. The companies she wants to connect them with aren't necessarily fully remote; her definition of remote-first includes offices where attendance is occasional rather than mandated. She's particularly drawn to companies in the social impact space, and to candidates at the senior-to-exec level who've done the corporate years and want something different - not necessarily to travel the world, just to have more control over their time.