Why We Made It
Discover why we created Expat Empire and how we help people move abroad
We want to be your guide to living abroad
After moving abroad on our own and having to figure everything out the hard way, we created Expat Empire to offer the advisory services we wanted when we were starting out to people with similar dreams who are struggling with the same challenges!
To learn more about why we started Expat Empire, please read our founder’s moving abroad experience below:
David's Journey to Japan
I had a long and winding path to living abroad, but my initial goal was to find a way to live in Japan. I started studying the Japanese language when I was 12 years old and it soon became my primary passion. It wasn’t long before I started dreaming about living and working in Japan.
I majored in finance and Japanese at university in hopes of being able to work in Japan after graduation. After receiving several rejections for Tokyo-based positions, I decided to start my career in the United States, but I never lost sight of my dream to go abroad.
Three years later, I received a job offer in Tokyo and moved to Japan shortly afterward. At long last, I was finally living the life I spent more than a decade dreaming about!
Searching for Guidance
While that might make it sound like my path to living abroad was easy and straightforward, that couldn’t be any further from the truth. I was rejected countless times for positions all over the world and frequently lost hope that I would be able to live abroad.
I was constantly searching for someone who could support me in achieving my international goals. For example, even as a university student, I emailed an alum working at a bank in Tokyo multiple times trying to get some advice or even a little bit of encouragement, but unfortunately, I never heard back from him.
There were so many dead ends in my search for help over the years that I often felt like giving up.
Starting Expat Empire
Even though I eventually made it to Japan, the memories of all the times I felt helpless during my arduous journey abroad made me want to support other people who have similar dreams of living abroad. This desire motivated me to create Expat Empire and release my first book Passport to Working in Japan in 2018.
While we initially focused on producing content, I soon started thinking about how we could support aspiring expats and nomads more directly. Over the years, I noticed that there were very few companies and services focused on helping individuals to go abroad. There were plenty of relocation management companies that could handle employees’ relocations for their employers, but there were hardly any companies that people without a sponsoring employer could turn to for help.
To figure out how we could best help people go abroad, we first spoke with the members of our audience who reached out to us for help. Though we could use our own moving abroad experiences as a starting point, we wanted to understand how we could help the people who needed it most. After speaking with people from all over the world, we gained a better understanding of their most pressing pain points and started developing our unique consulting services and Expat Tools to address them.
Are you looking for a guide?
You’ve come to the right place – we’re here to help you achieve your international dreams!
