I thought I had a location-flexible business. Moving countries proved I didn't.

I'm Italian, I live in Germany with my Indian husband, and our dream has always been to split our time between Europe and India.

This was the story I used to tell myself.

In 2018, I opened my YouTube channel and eventually, this kickstarted a series of events that made me a content creator. I used to work in the corporate world and it was not easy to make our dream life happen when working a 9-to-5 in an office. And so, I did what every millennial in a crisis would do: I quit my job. "Location freedom" was our dream, and both of us having our own remote businesses was the only solution.

As soon as we could, we started hopping on flights and running our online businesses from Italy, Germany, and India.

My content creator identity has been naturally built out of this fascinating life in between. The food, the markets, the constant negotiation of being foreign in a place you've genuinely chosen. People followed me for it, and brands started to find me interesting. I worked from my phone and my laptop, so I naively developed this quiet certainty that I had solved the thing everyone talks about: location freedom. Cool, right?

Yes, super cool. If it wasn't that a big chunk of my business started relying on my other alter-ego identities. Let me explain this point real quick.

When in India, I am known as "The Italian in India" or "The Italian who knows India really well." And when in Europe or Italy, I am known as "Giulia, your local Italian friend" or "Giulia, your European friend discovering hidden gems." So when I started actually moving between countries — a.k.a. actually building a life in more than one place — my story started to fall apart.

The authority topic

When you are physically inside a place, you produce a different kind of content, because the confidence is different. I could post about a new place I tried and people trusted it the way they trust a tip from a local friend.

However, the moment I started spending months in Italy or Germany, this changed in a silent but dramatic way. The comments and the DMs started being fewer; the interest was clearly not there anymore. For months, I told myself it was the algorithm and don't get me wrong, sometimes it actually is the algorithm. But eventually I had to be honest with myself: part of what I had been branding, unconsciously, was physical proximity. I was there, and that was the product. And when I wasn't there, "the product" — a.k.a. me — changed, or worse, it wasn't there anymore.

Brand partnerships were the first clear signal. What once felt easy now became slower. Some collaborations didn't make sense anymore, and small things started to matter more than I expected: time zones, cultural context, or where brands thought I was relevant.

The relationships I had already built held up, because those people knew me. What disappeared was the top of the pipeline, the new conversations.

Because here's what I hadn't accounted for: