In this vlog, Nir Zavaro shares his raw, first‑hand experience of relocating to Da Nang, Vietnam, and how the move is affecting his work and personal life. He describes the disconnect between glossy hotel photos and the reality of mold‑infested rooms, the difficulty of finding reliable coworking spaces, and the constant shuffling between coffee shops that disrupts his writing and webinar routine. He outlines his business updates: a growing pipeline of leads, a selective consulting approach, and a recent client engagement that saved the client roughly $150,000 in 2025. He also discusses his plans to develop a marketing/SEO framework, finish a book chapter, and produce more webinars. Throughout, he reflects on the emotional side of building in public, the importance of supportive friends, and the lessons learned about giving public praise and managing expectations with clients. The video ends with a call to action for viewers to reach out if they need help.
Chapters
On this episode, I wanted to vent a little bit. I'm in Vietnam. It's not exactly what I thought it would be, and I wanted to share with you how I feel. What's up? What's new? Are you ready? Let's go. What is up, beautiful people? This is Nir Zavaro, and welcome back to my channel. This is episode 5 of Building in Public. Not easy, if I have to be honest. I'm now in Vietnam, in a place called Da Nang. It's weird because the city feels like it's supposed to be high season, even though it's now cold and kind of gloomy. Hotels are expensive, apartments are expensive, yet it feels like there's no one in the streets. I'm here with a nice guy called Gabriel, and we're walking around, and sometimes it feels like we're the only people here. Not even locals. So we're trying to find our bearings here. The coworkings are not exactly what I wanted or had expected. We are now sitting in a very nice coffee place. It's been around for like 9 months. The food is good, the vibe is good, and kind of feels like a coworking. So we're enjoying that. Every time I travel, I need to move. It's hard finding the balance, starting everything again. I'm trying to find the one thing. So if the hotel is good, how do I build everything around it? If the hotel is not good— here's the thing about Vietnamese hotels, they do one thing amazingly well. You ready for this? The pictures. The pictures are unbelievable. It's crazy because everything you see, you want to stay at, and then you get there and it's rotten. There's mold everywhere. It sucks. You really don't want to stay there. I'm not even sure you're supposed to live there. But then again, a lot of places look like that. So the idea is that you have to find the difference between what it looks like in the picture and how it really looks. We've been going around the hotel. So you're booking a place, you have to go there, you have to see if it really is like in the pictures, and if not, go to the next place. I've never had that. Never, I think, in my life where I had to book a place and then go and see it and see if I can actually live there. So one of the main problems at the moment, I'm losing a lot of time moving between coffee shops. So I don't have an office, spending too much time finding accommodation. The food is good, not bad. No Thailand. I miss the food in Thailand. In general, I kind of miss Chiang Mai at the moment because I had a routine. The cowork was great. The friends were great. The gym was great. Finding my content writing again is hard. I haven't written a single word since I came here, so I'm trying to find my place. 3 webinars this week, so I'm really looking forward. One of the webinars is going to be in the middle of the night, which isn't the easiest for me to do a webinar at 2 AM for 90 minutes and stay excited. Now the problem is we're natural Internet will hold. And the last thing that's a problem is there's not enough room in the hotel room for me to stand up when I'm doing my webinars. I've always done, or at least since COVID I've done every event I could standing up. I actually had one event I did online a couple of months ago where I had a problem with my knee. It was a bit swollen and I had to sit down and it felt a bit— I couldn't find my stuff. and things. I hope you'll enjoy this video. When it comes to the visual, I'm working on learning a little bit about how to work with the camera and what to do with the audio. So that's also a thing. And business-wise, things are going well, I have to admit. There's more clients, there's more leads. It's interesting. I need to find a way to do— maybe I'll do a video about that, how to use the marketing structure to create a bit more leads. Another thing is that I don't really want or need too many clients. I need very specific clients that will take me to the next level. So just doing a bit of consulting isn't worth it. It has to be specific consulting clients to help me focus on the book writing. And that's great. One of the clients I'm actually working with, it's interesting, the second session we've done probably has saved them $150,000 just in 2025. It's the second time we are meeting. And it's just the beginning of doing something with them in terms of like their brand character. If I can prove this over and over again, mind-blowing. I want to talk a little bit about me feeling overwhelmed and ask you guys, how do you deal with your SEO? As I am now learning or finding that I can probably create a lot of content, but the angle I'm looking for isn't exactly clear to me. I'm going to try and conquer the words, the business storyteller. And I think it would be interesting to do that. Shouldn't be too hard, probably a couple of months. Let's say 3 to 6 months, I think I can do it. This week I will focus only on creating the webinars and content around that. The next week I'm going to focus on finishing another book chapter. I've finished the book chapter for the, the, the big Chapter is done, but it's a draft. And here are my thoughts. I'm not sure I'm ready to submit. I'm not sure it's good enough to the point where it's a complete chapter. The reason is I need to stray away from what everybody does, and I need to have a chapter. And I think that's what I'm going to focus on. You get that feeling sometimes? You need to do something a bit different. That'd be interesting to do. You get that feeling sometimes. You need to do a different thing, your own path. So just do it. Lastly, I think I wanna talk to you guys about accomplishing your dreams. And I think building in public is one of the scariest things about talking about my life and where I'm going and the business and other stuff. And I'm slowly unfolding. But I had a call yesterday with a good friend. He reached out, hey, how's it going? Tell me what's up. And I started to tell him and I sent him a picture of me losing weight and I'm getting fitter and stuff that's happening and the work, the book, the fact that I'm living in Vietnam. The level of excitement he had was unparalleled, and I think it was the first time in 3 months I actually have spoken about everything I've done to a good friend. Seeing how excited he got and to hear his things and him saying, I'm so happy for you, way to go forward, you're an inspiration— there were moments where I, um, I was in a coffee shop and I almost broke into tears. It was interesting. Do that for someone. Become someone's biggest fan. I think it's a good thing to do. I think I have 2 or 3 people I can say I'm their biggest fan, and it'll be good, good for you. I wanna touch on a small thing. It's a bit off topic, but might be relevant for a lot of you. A good friend and client posted about my work, our mutual work together, And it didn't go well with his agents. They got really upset that he didn't mention them and he didn't talk about them. Don't expect people to post about you or to root for you. Do your best. If it's worth it, they'll do it. And I think they couldn't let it go, which I think would cause huge damage for them. I don't care. I got what I needed. He got what he needed. Don't sit there and count. Don't have a table of who did what and when. It's not worth it. Try and focus on your own shit. Do the best. And if you want to say something good about someone, just say it and screw everything else. What they did, I think, will harm them in the long term. And it's sad to see that. I think if you don't have a path, go find someone else's path and work with them. Help them. It's fine. It's not— there's nothing bad. There's nothing wrong about it. I think it's a good thing. That was my update of the week. It's a bit all over the place. I needed this. I hope you guys are good. And, um, as always, if you need anything, DM me. Hopefully this will help you guys do something good.
