I built a mobility app from a tugboat in Papua New Guinea. Here's what I learned about who actually wants out

Hey IH, Louis here, 21, solo founder in Australia

6 months ago I was on a tugboat off the coast of Papua New Guinea, working 12 hour shifts in 35 degree heat. The crew were mostly older blokes who had been doing this for 20+ years. Most of them hated it, often talking about their latest holiday or when they worked offshore, and how they wanted to live there permanently but simply didnt know how.

One guy was Filipino, had been working international rigs for a decade, still couldn't get residency anywhere. Another was a kiwi who wanted out of NZ but didn't know where his money would go furthest. Conversations like this happened every shift.

I came home to a friend group of people with their own dreams of moving overseas, one to Europe, one to America.

On top of that, my own parents wanted to leave Australia retire in Spain. All for their own individual gripes with our home country.

I noticed a pattern, of underserved, confused people.

When I got off the boat I started looking into mobility tools. They were all either:

1. Quiz to a $x PDF report

2. Massive immigration law firm sites where everything is gated behind a consultation

3. Outdated forums and reddit threads

So I started building globale.app. Free to browse, shows you every country you could move to based on your passport, profession, family background, and ~12 other factors. The idea is "necessary not useful", every feature surfaces an implication you didn't know to ask about. Your score drops 23 points if you take that Berlin job, here's why. That kind of thing.

I launched the MVP only yesterday and I am constantly refining the web app in my freetime to make it as USEFUL as possible, thats the goal. 15 countries fully seeded by hand (real data, real eligibility logic, not scraped). 39k rows of passport access data. With the goal being 100 countries of fully filled out visa and passport info.

What's working so far:

• Reddit replies in expat subs converted at 50% (small sample, 2 helpful replies, 1 turned into a real user)

• My mum (64, wants to retire to europe) became my favourite user testing subject. Watching her get confused taught me more in 30 mins than 3 weeks of building

What's not working

• X has converted at 0% across countless posts

• Mobile optimisation took way longer than expected

Open to feedback, especially from anyone who has moved countries or is thinking about it.

Live at globale.app, free, no signup to browse country pages.