As I outlined in the article, Live in Lima and Work in the USA, a viable path to accruing wealth is to obtain a top paying job while living in a low cost area. Lima, Peru affords you the opportunity to have big city perks, at rural area cost of living. However, the question remains, what kind of jobs can you get to earn a top tier salary while living in Lima?
One of my friends in Lima was a programmer named Thomas who always had his finger on the pulse of what would be the next big trend. One day he pulled me aside and said that he was considering learning the programing language for something called Android because he thought that would be the next big trend in cell phones. At the time, I had no idea what Android was, but history has proven Thomas correct. Sadly for Thomas, his regular day job prevented him from jumping on the Android gravy train from the beginning. So, as you can see, sometimes it’s not just knowing what the next big thing will be, it’s finding the time and flexibility to seize the opportunity.
His concept was pretty simple, come up with an App that you can sell for a dollar or so, which becomes a viral sensation. This is essentially the Coca-Cola method, as Coke doesn’t break the bank on each individual sale of their product, but they’ve somehow managed to make their brand ubiquitous. Just for fun, Thomas and I used to brainstorm App ideas.
We’d often relax on the weekends by playing cards, but the fact that we had to shuffle the deck slowed us down, which became the catalyst for my first and only App idea.
“Hey Thomas,” I said, during one friendly afternoon card game, “how about an App that syncs up an iPad with phones?”
“What for?”
“Well, the iPad could show the community cards, and then everyone could have their hole cards on their personal phones.”
Thomas didn’t seem all that impressed, and despite my efforts to convince him, he was never sold on the idea. Since I didn’t have the technological background to pursue application programming, the idea just fluttered away on the wind.
About two years later, Thomas sent me an email with the query, “Is this what you were proposing all that time ago?” The email contained a link to a new App that allowed you to sync your iPad to several iPhones and play card games. Thomas said he’d take any future ideas more seriously, but I think, at least in the realm of Apps, the window has pretty much closed. Still, for every door that closes, at least two more open, and in our technological age, it might be more like a factor of ten or a hundred. In fact, I’m not sure there’s ever been a period in human history with more opportunity than we have today.
On another occasion, I met a businessman from the US who made his money by doing the actual digital transfer that sent text messages from senders to recipients. My understanding was that he was one of many independent contractors phone companies utilized to perform this service, although this business model may have changed since this conversation took place. He went into detail about the technical side of his work, but I discovered I was in over my head about two seconds into talking to him.
“How much do you think I get paid per text message?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, “A thousandth of a cent per message?”
He confirmed that the amount of payment per transaction was astronomically small, but he was able to support himself by performing millions of transactions at a time. Part of the reason he was able to offer the service at a better rate than his competitors was because of his lower cost of living while residing in Lima, Peru.
The fact is, there are opportunities everywhere, and sometimes the lower cost of living in Lima helps uncover business ideas that would be infeasible anywhere else. Whether you’re considering developing a new App, you have an idea to revolutionize the phone industry, or you’ve developed a new energy broker platform, the low overhead of Lima, Peru can give you the economic advantage of stretching your start up cash for a couple more months, or years than you might have been afforded back in the United States. The old saying is true, time is money, and if you can give your business a little more time to fly than your competitors, that can make all the difference between success and failure.
