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My city was filling up with digital nomads. I saw a business opportunity in our family home.

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This as-told-to essay is based on an interview with Nguyen Thị Thanh Thơ, aka Hana Nguyen, 36, founder of Hana’s Coworking in Da Nang, Vietnam. It has been edited for length and clarity

I never planned to work with digital nomads. In fact, three years ago, I didn’t even know what “coworking” meant.

I was born in the countryside of central Vietnam and, in my teens, moved to Da Nang with my family for college. I first studied business administration, and later trained to become a pharmacist.

After graduating in 2016, I found a job in a local pharmacy. It was the typical job for many Vietnamese graduates: stable but low-paying; not especially challenging but also very boring.

I couldn’t get excited about it, and I didn’t see a future for myself there.

In 2023, I met a foreigner on an online forum who wanted to go hiking in the Marble Mountains, a group of cave-like temple structures in southern Da Nang. I decided to join.

At that time, I was curious about foreigners, but my English was poor, and I didn’t really know how to connect with people from other countries.

That small encounter changed everything. A few days after visiting the mountains, my new foreign friend took me to a coworking space. I had never seen anything like it before — people from all over the world working on laptops, speaking in English, and sharing ideas.

Something clicked immediately.


Group of people playing pool in Da Nang, Vietnam.

She began organizing events for both locals and digital nomads.

Provided by Hana Nguyen



I felt drawn to the community

I didn’t have money or experience, but I had motivation. In early 2024, I spoke to a friend who owned a hotel with an unused floor.

I offered to manage a coworking space there. I told her that I could try working there for two months for free. If it worked out, we could talk about money. If it didn’t, we could both move on.

After a few months, the project really took off, and I got some good exposure from Vietnamese TV and visiting content creators.

I worked there full-time for more than a year, doing everything myself — managing the space, cleaning, talking to customers, and organizing events. I negotiated a salary of about $250 a month, which wasn’t much, but I loved it.

Eventually, I realized I was building something valuable and with potential — but I didn’t own it. I began feeling exhausted and knew it wasn’t sustainable. Around the same time, my dad fell ill with cancer. I knew I needed to make more money to help my family, so when another friend offered me a space inside his bar — unused during the day — I said yes.

That was the first coworking space where I felt some ownership.

I didn’t have to pay rent, which worked because I had very little money — I couldn’t even afford to hire staff. But still, I managed to build the community. I organized events, beach trips, yoga, dinners — anything that helped people connect.

Since I wasn’t paying rent, I knew this arrangement could only be temporary, so I worked up the courage to ask my parents if we could convert one of the floors in our three-story family home into a coworking space. I explained that I’d need to borrow money from family members and spend a few months renovating the house.


Hana Nguyễn

Duc Nguyen for BI



Despite the risk, my parents agreed

It wasn’t easy. I was working nonstop and felt stressed, but the top floor, which can seat 18, filled up quickly, so I expanded the coworking space to other parts of the house. I can now fit 30 people and charge $76 a month.

I still manage everything myself. I don’t have employees. My father is a guard at the entrance, and my mother cleans the place, so it’s still very much a family business.

Many people ask me why there are so many digital nomads in Da Nang. I think it’s because the city is friendly, affordable, and super convenient. You have the beach, mountains, urban life, and an international airport close by.


On the beach in Da Nang, Vietnam.

Da Nang has a mix of beaches, mountains, urban life, and an international airport nearby.

Provided by Hana Nguyen



Da Nang is the kind of place where you can go for a walk along the beach in the morning, work during the day, swim in the sea in the afternoon, and eat great food in the evening — and it’s not expensive.

The biggest challenge I’ve seen among digital nomads is loneliness. Many people arrive alone, without friends, and everything feels unfamiliar — the culture, transportation, and daily life. That’s why community is so important. Everyone researches online before they come, but a real connection only happens in person. That’s exactly what I’m trying to foster with my coworking space.

At my events, around 20% of participants are Vietnamese. Many come to practice English, but they also learn about different ways of working and living. Some locals have even found freelance work with nomads in design, tech, and marketing. That makes me proud.

I’m still learning. I don’t have a big master plan. I just know I love connecting people, and I believe community can change lives — including mine.

Do you have a story to share about living abroad? Contact the editor at akarplus@businessinsider.com.




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EY’s chief digital officer says marketing is at an AI ‘inflection point’

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Lou Cohen, EY’s chief digital officer, said many marketers are not yet taking advantage of the benefits of artificial intelligence.

Cohen, who is also a professor at New York University, Yeshiva University, and Baruch College, said marketing is at an “inflection point,” with investment shifting from general digital innovation to AI transformation.

Cohen said that marketers who understand how to use AI in an assistive way, by focusing on what outcomes it delivers best, will access a deeper level of audience segmenting, targeting, and testing. He was interviewed for CMO Insider at Business Insider’s studio in New York City.

Ultimately, Cohen said, the marketing function will embrace the new opportunity. “Marketers, they’re not afraid to try things,” Cohen said. “We’re going to learn more from the things that we fail with and that don’t work than the things that do.”

The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

We are at an interesting inflection point. In today’s marketing environment, you really need to understand how to make AI work for you; otherwise, you will end up working for it.

There are efficiency and operational gains to be had. But if you think about the outcomes that AI can enable from a marketing perspective, we could be smarter about how we segment our audiences for different campaigns. We could be more efficient in the ways our advertising runs. We could test more rapidly to get better-quality content in front of the right audiences at the right time in the right place.

But most marketing teams are not yet set up to take advantage of this potential. So the investments of the last 15 years in digital transformation are now shifting into AI transformation.

It’s a bit unknown now. Marketers are not totally comfortable with this because we’re so worried that it’s going to hallucinate or give us something that isn’t accurate. Marketers, they’re not afraid to try things. We’re going to learn more from the things that we fail with and that don’t work than from the things that do.

My colleague came up with a great way to evaluate the quality of our content using AI. We can paste in an article that a partner of ours wrote, and it will give us recommendations on how to make that piece of content better. But we’re never — I shouldn’t say never — we’re not likely to use content created by AI. But we certainly can use AI to enhance and give feedback to our content creators.

Hallucinations are real. The challenge is that as consumers of these technologies, we don’t yet understand the difference between probabilistic and deterministic outcomes. Probabilistic is the likely correct response that the AI is trying to give us. Deterministic is “one plus one equals two,” and arguably, one plus one always equals two.

When you’re doing a search on Google or Bing, for example, you are getting a deterministic response. You’re getting what it believes to be the likely to answer your question. Versus with the LLMs, the ChatGPTs, the Llamas, the Geminis of the world, you’re getting a probabilistic response. The model is bringing a bunch of different sources together to determine the answer it thinks you should get based on your prompt.

That means if we were using these tools for their designed purpose, we’d still need search engines to just navigate to the things we’re looking for, or to find the needles in the haystack of the internet. But LLMs give us a different opportunity. They can be assistants. That was some of the original idea behind these AI tools, to assist people in doing different tasks.

I think of these LLMs more as marketing assistants to give me real-time ideas, feedback, or suggestions, rather than doing the task for me. That’s a human putting AI to work to get better outcomes faster than if I were to just do it myself.




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