Being a freelancer is great – you get as much flexibility as you want in choosing hours, clients, and the type of work you’re completing. And with this flexibility also comes the option to pick up and leave for travels whenever you’d like to hit the road and work remotely.
However, without the coverage working for a typical company might provide, finding flexible travel, safety and health insurance for when you need it can be a challenge when working internationally.
Norway’s Sondre Rasch recognized this need when creating a website for freelance workers, and figured there had to be some kind of way to provide a social safety net that worked abroad for those who don’t qualify. So he created SafetyWing to provide insurance options for remote or digital nomad freelancers, as well as options for remote employers to cover their contractors and employees. But ultimately, Sondre wants to evolve SafetyWing into ‘a country on the internet’, and create a digital passport that would break down barriers and provide social security for remote workers globally.
Allow me to introduce Sondre Rasch…
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My name is Sondre Rasch and I am the CEO and founder of SafetyWing. SafetyWing is ultimately working to build a country on the internet and a global social safety net. However, as of now we offer a global health insurance to remote teams and digital nomads.
I am from Norway, and previously worked as a policy advisor for the Government of Norway. I then started a freelancer platform called SuperSide. It was there that I discovered that the freelancers there did not qualify for a social safety net due to working internationally online. And so eventually I set out to solve that problem, by taking inspiration from the Norwegian social safety net, to make one that works globally.
The three founders sat with our designer and front-end developer for 4 hours a day and live-designed, prototyped and discussed how the product might look. However as we got an actual insurance partner for our first product, Nomad Insurance, we had to temper many of our original goals for the first version. I was the product guy talking to customers, Sarah was the backend developer, and Hans was the lawyer dealing with our insurance partners. We had a weekly Monday meeting where we reflected on what we achieved that week and set individual goals for next week.
The first days we quickly ideated around the idea, which started as the idea of building a global social safety net for people who work online. We quickly realized several insights, including that this might become the first country on the internet, since this is a responsibility that is the domain of countries today.
The founders were together in Oslo at the time, but we were all living different places and further collaboration was remote. We started part-time slowly developing the idea. We designed a first draft of the website, and then developed a potential first product. Then we talked to users, reached out to potential insurance partners, registered the company and did a tiny amount of fundraising from friends. About six months into this, we applied to YC W2018 and got in the same day we got the contract signed with our insurance partner, and from then on it was full-speed ahead.
We then built the website, negotiated and built the insurance policy, and build a marketing method all at once over the course of a couple of months – and then we were live.
We were super mindful of how to do this going in. The core idea we built on was to make a product people loved so much they told their friends about it. We decided to be different and to be authentic. We did not want to look like anything else, but to look like something we would love. This self-trust we regarded as needed to be remembered and noticed, as well as to build trust over time. This was in stark contrast with what everyone we talked to advised us to do by the way.
We also put an enormous amount of emphasis on simplifying our product and pricing, and being super easy to understand and honest in all customer communication. The idea here was that if we could get it simple enough, then we could put the pricing and everything on the front page – which was unheard of in insurance, especially for a product that works worldwide. And then people could recommend it to friends, because how can you recommend something if you do not know what it will cost them?
As for distribution channels. We decided early on not to do ads, in particular, performance ads. We saw that as being too corrupting of an enterprise. We were looking for channels where we thought we had a competitive advantage, and eventually went for an ambassador program. This was tracking links used by influencers who made content about us essentially. This worked well and was a good idea, and it still works to this day.
All the Y Combinator content for sure, read everything by Paul Graham and Sam Altman, and check out YCs youtube channel, it is really good.
Today we are over 150 people working across 60 countries. We have tens of thousands of customers. We are working on our vision still, and it will even take a few more years before we can actually launch a global social safety net membership, as well as the passport. But by this point we have gotten so far that I am fairly confident we are going to make it.
I think just do it is a good advice, and act much faster than you think. With my first company, a key reason we were able to take off despite being complete novices, was because both my co-founder and I had an almost reckless willingness to act and make decisions very fast. This way we were able to walk up the learning curve quickly enough to make things start working before we died.
I am not much active on social media, but you can check out our websites www.safetywing.com for Nomad Insurance and Remote Health, or www.plumia.org for the country on the internet initiative.
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