Part of the fun of travel is by yourself - exploring new places, trying new things, the independence of the adventure in itself. But as with anything in life, as time drags on, you want some company. Friends, family, or even just anyone you don’t have to make the extra effort to connect with.
If you’ve spent any time traveling or spending extended periods in different places, you’ve probably felt this yourself. Or perhaps you’ve found yourself following a job and hopping to new cities where you haven’t quite found that group yet. Or it’s even possible to be in a place where those casual, easy friendships are just hard to come by. Whatever the case, all people need human interaction.
Everyone at some point in their life feels lonely, and unfortunately for nomads, the vast majority of travel accommodations don’t take this into account: Hotels sequester you to your own room, apartment rentals leave you disconnected from community…
Though hostels provide a great option to make connections, they are primarily targeted towards shorter stays, and therefore don’t provide the depth/strength of connections desired by nomads. Coliving spaces are seemingly the best option, but there is difficulty and inefficiency in identifying the unique operators in each city. Not to mention, the vast majority require 3+ month minimum terms, which can be off-putting for people just getting into the lifestyle or wanting to try out a new city.
On the bright side, the digital nomad community has scrapped together a number of different ways to create a semblance of community across different cities around the world. Platforms like Nomadlist have created online platforms that facilitate connections and communications for nomads that travel around the globe. Individual locales like Madeira have created exclusive online communities to facilitate connections with people in the area.
While these platforms are super helpful, from a user’s POV, they’re extremely inefficient.
While the global platforms are great for attracting a large crowd, the issue here is proximity - there’s friction in coordinating, there’s friction in transport, there’s friction in connecting. Even with nomads dispersed across each individual city, the responsibility rests with the individual to coordinate meeting, getting to a meeting point, and actually connecting with the other individuals. I’ve been witness to this on multiple occasions as I’ve tried meeting with people through Nomadlist to no avail (not responding, schedule conflicts, transport incompatibilities).
The local platforms are great for finding people potentially closer to you, but this is highly dependent on each individual city having active users. Plus, it then becomes inefficient from a user’s standpoint: how do you get plugged into each of these communities? Yes, it’s nice to stay in certain places for extended times and get plugged into their local communities, but how do you go about finding each community for each locale? The success and validation of each community could potentially even be considered the antithesis of being a digital nomad. If the idea of being a nomad is to travel around, then it’s really not conducive to setup and get permanently involved in local groups.
So the two problems to solve:
Decrease the friction in meeting others
Increase active number of users in the community
So how do you solve those problems?
I would suggest that having nodes of concentrated users, I.e. users of a platform that is integrated across various properties around the globe is closest truly solving these issues. You might suggest that the answer is something like Outsite, where the platform provides a sense of interconnectedness while the properties provide places to stay, making it easy to put together plans and meet new people. But we believe this is only part of the solution.
The key that is missing is making the entire system and experience frictionless.
This is what we’re building.
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