The Freedom Series: Johanna Kristin on Just Existing Somewhere Else
Words by Johanna Kristin | Edited by Tania from Slower Travels
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Johanna Kristin has never really known another way of living. At fifteen, she learned to skydive. At sixteen, she left her hometown in Sweden for school in another town because she needed to move and needed an adventure. At seventeen, even that wasn't enough, so she quit school entirely and moved to the Canary Islands to sell tandem jumps to tourists on the beach.
That was just the beginning.
Since then, Johanna has lived and travelled across countries and continents, rarely staying anywhere longer than a year or two. The longest she's stayed in one place was three years in Glasgow, until even the friends, the festivals and concerts couldn’t contain that drive she had to move. She gave up the flat, quit her job, and booked a one-way ticket to Mexico. And she’s still on the move now.
"I've always had a restless soul and a need to move. I feel suffocated if I stay in one place too long."
The Year That Taught Her to Slow Down
The past year has been Johanna's most nomadic and instructive yet. Bosnia for a digital-nomad workation, then a month travelling the Balkans, then Spain, volunteering at a small animal rescue, then Athens, then Asia for three months, then back to Europe for summer. Unsurprisingly, somewhere in the middle of all that movement, she hit a wall.
"I travelled a bit too fast," she admits. "Staying in places for a few days sometimes, a week or two sometimes. It made it hard to grow the business."
Her solution this summer was a cabin on an island in Sweden, where she based herself for four months. Slowing down while she worked and rebuilt.
It's a pattern that will feel familiar to anyone who has tried to build something while constantly on the move: the travel wins, and the work suffers. Johanna learned that the hard way, and she's honest about it. Next winter, she plans to stay longer in each place.
What the Life Actually Costs
This is where Johanna's story gets practically useful. She is, by her own description, a budget traveller. She makes it work on a maximum of €1,000 a month, including flights. Sometimes less.
The formula isn't complicated, but it requires discipline and experience. Stay longer in affordable countries like Vietnam or Sri Lanka. Sleep in hostel dorms when private rooms get expensive. Eat local food. Skip the tourist sights. Use Workaway (a platform that offers free accommodation and meals in exchange for a few hours of work each day) to stretch the budget further.
But perhaps the most useful thing she says about cost is this:
"I'm not on holiday. I am just existing somewhere else."
That distinction matters. Holiday travel and nomadic living are priced completely differently, and confusing the two is how people convince themselves the lifestyle is unaffordable when it isn't.
Two Businesses and a SaaS Platform She Built Herself
While all of this has been happening, Johanna has been building two businesses.
The first is North of No East, where she builds Notion systems for tourism businesses to help them organise their operations. The second, launched this summer, is a SaaS platform called threeArch. It’s a tool that lets tour operators, retreat leaders and group trip organisers build guest portals and share a single link with travellers containing everything they need before a trip, replacing the scattered emails and unwieldy PDFs that currently dominate the industry.
It's a product that solves a problem most of its potential customers don't yet know they have, which is both the most interesting and the most challenging position for a founder to be in.
On top of all that, she's writing essays on Substack and taking online university courses.
Her work rhythm reflects her life: no fixed hours, no fixed days. Sometimes early mornings, other times late nights. She follows her energy. Her goal is to eventually work around twenty hours a week, which is enough to sustain her life without consuming it.
The Hardest Part
For Johanna, it’s finding a routine and staying consistent.
The past year of fast travel taught her that momentum and productivity are often in opposition. You can't build something serious if you're repacking your bag every three days. The Swedish cabin summer was her way to balance out all this fast-paced travel. It allowed her to slow down, dedicate some thinking space to work, rather than booking the next train.
She also misses her friends in the UK, where she shared life with people who knew her well and were always up for a festival. "I make an effort to go back and see them when I can," she says. It's not a complaint, just an honest accounting of one of the downsides to such a nomadic life. New friends are always entering the picture, but that doesn’t mean we miss our old friends less.
The Setup Behind the Freedom
Johanna is Swedish, has UK settled status, and is self-employed in Britain. She'd love a base in Scotland eventually so she could return for the summers. For now, her Swedish passport gives her visa-free access to much of the world, and she applies for visas when she wants to stay somewhere longer.
She'll be the first to tell you she hasn't entirely figured out the logistics yet. But that honesty is refreshing in a space that often pretends there's a clean system behind everything.
What She'd Tell Someone Starting Out
Johanna's advice is characteristically direct. Forget waiting for a remote job as they're harder to find than people think. Start a service business instead. Everyone has skills they can offer, and a freelance service business is the most accessible entry point into location independence.
She's a believer in investing in courses and programs. Not because you can't find the information for free on YouTube, but because investing money in something creates the motivation to actually follow through. Do your due diligence on anything before you buy, though. There are plenty of people out there making big promises. But don't be afraid to back yourself.
She's also a strong advocate for digital nomad events and conferences. She's attended three this year and credits them with giving her a sense of community, inspiration, and a much clearer picture of what's possible. And for anyone worried about the cost of getting started, Workaway offers a genuine way to travel affordably while getting to know a place from the inside rather than passing through it as a tourist.
What She's Still Figuring Out
How to grow a product that solves a problem people don't know they have.
It's one of the most honest answers we’ve heard. Johanna isn't pretending she's arrived somewhere. She's mid-build, mid-journey, mid-figuring-it-out. But aren’t we all?
Follow Johanna's Story
📷 Instagram: @finding.noeast
✍️ Substack: Johanna Kristin
🌍 North of No East: northofnoeast.com
🛠️ Byth Reach: bythreearch.com
💼 LinkedIn: northofnoeast
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