Shift was made for remote workers with a wanderlust.
Challenge
Emergent tourism regulations
Goal
Facilitate new modes of travel
Scope
Market and user research
to create startup business plan
Outcome
Shift: International trip
packages for working vacations
Collaborators
Spencer Bowen | Design Lead
Lisa Sanford | Project Manager
Sabrina Cismas | Research Coordinator
Kot Hordynski | Financial Lead
Client
Self-initiated
Background
As the preferences of job seekers trend toward remote, project-based work, governments worldwide have been forced to reconcile with new modes of international travel.
Due to an increase in digital nomads, authorities now distinguish between business trips, traditional vacations, and working vacations for documentation and taxation purposes.
Working Vacation
Taken to live and work as a non-resident for an extended period of time. On average, remote work visas permit 1–6 month visits.
Business Trip
Taken for a specific purpose such as conferences, retreats, in-person meetings, or seminars. Business trips often require a business visa.
Traditional Vacation
Taken for leisure during time off from work. On average, traditional vacations span 1–2 weeks.
Competitive Landscape
Resources for travel-curious remote workers are limited to online communities and group travel programs. Adjacent categories include travel agencies, visa expeditors, and corporate travel software. None of these services are equipped to provide assistance with planning a working vacation.
Startups with a focus on visa compliance for working vacations often provide false or incomplete information and even encourage users to mislead immigration officials or hire expensive legal advisors.
Interview Insights
To establish a more detailed profile of our target customer, the team interviewed remote workers about their travel aspirations.
Through these interviews, we discovered travel programs offering group experiences and cohabitation appeal more to self-defined digital nomads, whereas other remote workers shared different values.
Most interviewees agreed that the term digital nomad implies unstable living conditions.
Unlike their nomadic counterparts, our customer feels less confident navigating tourism regulations, prefers to spend more time in a single destination, values a flexible schedule, and seeks out private accomodations. As such, the frustrations of the planning phase present as a major barrier to this market.
Product
Shift is a specialized travel concierge that provides remote workers with international trip packages for stress-free working vacations.
Trip packages include:
Visa Assistance
Flights
Accomodations
Travel Insurance
Customer Experience
At this stage, the customer is somewhat familiar with the idea of a working vacation, but research can be time-consuming. Shift offers the promise of expert guidance.
Customers submit an intake form to receive a personalized list of eligible destinations. Occupation, income, and trip length are criteria used to determine destinations. This list also includes an estimated budget for each destination to help customers can make informed decisions faster.
Once the customer has selected a destination, purchasing a trip package makes planning simple. Customers with flexible dates are offered the chance to browse accomodation options before selecting flights.
Before submitting a visa application, the customer must select travel insurance and accomodations and review a checklist of required documents.
The customer must confirm all visa requirements have been met to unlock a destination-specific visa application walkthrough.
Financial Model
Comprehensive financial projections were crafted according to interviews with potential service partners in accomodations and travel insurance as well as digital marketing benchmarks.
As a first-mover with a niche travel offering, the largest cost-center is customer acquisition. The foundation of Shift, a service-aggregation model built on a digital platform, requires minimal upfront development and a small staff to maintain.
Shift operates on two main revenue streams: Trip package sales and referral commission from service partners.
Fundraising
Research indicates that working vacations and slow travel are growing trends. However, pursuing an emergent market presents a significant fundraising challenge.
To get a minimum viable product to market, our financial model relies on a low-overhead, bootstrapped approach and a short crowdfunding campaign. This initial campaign seeks funds to reach profitable operations post-launch.
Series A financing post-profit will provide the means for the founding team to pursue growth opportunities and bring travel services in-house.
Brand
The Shift namesake refers to both scheduled working hours and a move from one place to another. This transitional state is also echoed in the shift between the sans-serif and more freehand letterforms of the logo.
Shift’s signature color is a bellhop red, a nod to our concierge travel service. The overall aesthetic of our website is modern, imaginative, and unpretentious, leveraging digital collage to create a sense of excitement and prioritizing minimalism and ease-of-use over decorative elements.
Validation
The exercise of designing a questionnaire prompted to team to consider the relationship between awareness and interest.
In order to eliminate confusion around specific concepts and phrases without creating a bias, the team utilized the pretest-posttest method. Participants were asked to answer a set of questions (pretest), then asked to read a short paragraph about working vacations, remote work travel requirements, and visa requirements. After reading this paragraph, participants were asked to answer the same set of questions (posttest).
This method produced promising results. The team observed a 20% increase to the importance of obtaining a remote work visa when comparing pretest and posttest responses.
This work culminated in 15-page actionable business plan and 30-minute presentation to a panel of experienced business professionals. Shift Beta will launch in 2024.been announced.