The Cross-Border Advantage: Working Remotely From Tunisia for the World

In 2019 I went full-time remote as a software engineer for a Japanese company — working from Tunis, eight time zones behind the team. My Tunisian businesses kept running alongside it. Years later, that combination is the single biggest influence on how I build anything.

Here's what working across borders has taught me, and why I think Tunisia is a strong place to do it from.

Distance forces good habits

When your team is on another continent, the habits that are "nice to have" in an office become survival skills:

• Write it down. Decisions, context and next steps live in writing, because you can't lean over a desk to ask.
• Make the overlap count. Tunis is eight hours behind Tokyo, so a Tunisian morning meets the Japanese afternoon. Those shared hours are for decisions; everything else happens asynchronously.
• Deliver first, and trust follows. Remote teams judge you on what you ship and when you said you'd ship it. Reliability is the whole reputation.
• Over-communicate the bad news. A problem flagged early is a plan; a problem discovered late is a crisis.

Those habits transfer directly into running businesses with small teams.

The arbitrage of seeing two markets

Working across borders means constantly comparing how things are done in different places. That comparison is where many of my business ideas come from. There are three kinds of gap worth noticing:

• Cost. Things that are expensive in one market can be produced or delivered well, for less, in another.
• Taste. A product, style or service that's ordinary in one country can feel fresh in another.
• Expectation. What customers accept as "normal service" varies enormously — and wherever expectations are low, a reliable business stands out.

Someone who only knows one market sees the way things are. Someone who works between markets sees the way things could be.

Why Tunisia is a good base

• Time zone. UTC+1 overlaps the whole European working day and the end of the Asian one.
• Languages. Arabic, French and English open three very different markets.
• Talent. Tunisia trains strong engineers, designers and marketers — and more of them work for foreign companies every year.
• Proximity. Europe is a short flight away, and Africa and the Middle East are next door.

It isn't frictionless. Payments, exchange rules and bureaucracy take real effort, and I'd never pretend otherwise. But the advantages are real and, in my view, still underrated.

How it shaped the ventures

Cross-border work runs through almost everything I build. Pipeline Studio works with clients wherever they are. NomadOS exists because the paperwork of working across borders — visas, tax residency, cost of living — is the same headache for every remote worker. And BuildTogether helps Tunisians at home and abroad put their skills behind local projects.

Advice for Tunisians who want to work remotely

1. Build a portfolio of shipped work. Real projects beat certificates. Show what you built and what it changed.
2. Write clear English. Most remote work is written. Clear messages are a competitive advantage.
3. Work asynchronously by default. Update people before they ask; document decisions as you make them.
4. Be boringly reliable. Meet the dates you commit to — that's what gets you the next contract.
5. Sort out the admin early. Understand how you'll be paid and what the rules are for your situation before the first invoice. I wrote about the money side in earning in foreign currency, spending in dinars.

What remote work isn't

Remote work isn't a permanent holiday, and it isn't working less. Done well it usually means more structure, not less: fixed hours for the overlap with your team, clear boundaries for everything else, and the discipline to deliver without anyone watching. The freedom is real — but it's the freedom to organise your own day, not to skip it.

The advantage is the perspective

The real advantage of working across borders isn't the salary or the flexibility. It's the perspective: seeing your own market from the outside while still being part of it. That's where the best opportunities are — and it's available from a desk in Tunis.

Follow what comes next — Asia, the Y60 build and the road south — in the journal and on the next adventure page.