Harry had a call one day with a recruiter who hired for roles in Dublin, Ireland. Guinness, pubs and crappy weather…how different could Dublin be to London? In this call, the recruiter explained to Harry that they also hired for roles in the Cayman Islands (I still to this day think this is a very wide scope for 1 poor recruiter!) Laying on our bed doom scrolling, Harry walked into the room and asked me the question that would change the course of our overseas adventure: 

Driven by a desire to adventure, do things out of the ordinary and generally just being a golden retriever girlfriend, I responded with, “Yes, for sure! That sounds fun”.

Now I won’t bore you with the details of the interview process but within 5 working days Harry had received an offer. From laughing about eating coconuts for breakfast and scuba diving on the weekends; to having rapid fire serious conversations about our life plan and where we were heading; to doing the roadshow of news with each of our parents back “home”; to finally accepting the offer. The week was exhausting, exhilarating and in my most eloquent description, random.

The first thing I did once we confirmed the offer was jump on Instagram. Over the years, my relationship with Instagram had been transformative. When I first signed up to the Gram I had a heinous amount of followers and followed too many people I didn’t really know. Why did I think it was “cool”, let alone safe to have 1,500 people following my life everyday? In 2020, in desperate need of a break from instagram I deleted the app and didn’t have the urge to redownload it until a whole 2 years later. When I made space for the app in my life again, I approached it very cautiously. I spent the first week removing 900 or so followers and muting everyone that I didn’t interact with on a weekly basis. NB: If you are wanting to do this too, Instagram will think you’re a bot because you’re deleting so many followers in one go so I would recommend carving out some ‘tea, biccie and remove pointless Instagram followers’ time in your day. It’s a slog, but it’s so worth it. Push through.

So, anyway, I jump onto my Instagram (version 2.0) and plug into the search bar various iterations of the words: Cayman Islands, Expat, Life, Australian. No dedicated pages show up. I download the much dreaded app that I had been avoiding due to my addictive personality (a story for another day), TikTok. I quickly create a profile, plug in my key search terms and again, no dedicated pages show up.

At this point, my mind was going wild with ideas about how I could tap into this market on social media. A ‘day in the life on Cayman’ reels; The trials and tribulations of an expat on Cayman; Restaurants and coffee shops you need to check out on Cayman… the list went on. I started furiously saving reel templates that would help me build this content and audio that created a life is short/go live the moments/nostalgia vibe (which, let’s be honest, we all love). But, my idea had 3 main problems: