Why we stopped laying bricks

A few years ago we wrote about a traveler who came upon three men working. The first said he was laying bricks. The second said he was putting up a wall. The third said he was building a cathedral.

We used that parable to explain what we were doing. Our first two products were our first two bricks. Then income stabilization, retirement, life insurance, disability coverage would be the next ones. We’d add one at a time, in order, until the thing stood up.

Turns out, although we still believe in the cathedral, we were wrong about the method. 

We realized that at a certain point, hard things are easier than easy things. They demand attention and force action. Easy things get neglected precisely because they're easy (or seem easy): you assume you'll get to them, and you don't do even the small things required to make them work.

So rather than laying brick by brick, we built a ship (cathedral?) in a bottle, from no existing blueprint, and hauled the whole thing up at once: this is Nomad Citizen.

The core problem hasn't changed since 2018. Almost everything that makes life stable— healthcare, sick leave, unemployment support, parental leave, pensions— is administered by a country, funded through an employer, and conditional on staying in one place. The systems were designed around a job at a company in a country, and everything else is an exception.

But the exception is growing. Freelancers increasingly fall outside these systems even in countries with the strongest social protection in the world, because the schemes were drawn around salaried employment and never redrawn. 

What people end up doing is assembling something themselves. A travel policy from one company (pretty easy), a health plan from another (easy), disability coverage (a bit harder), life insurance if someone would write it for a person with no permanent address (annoying). The patchwork safety net spreads across several claims processes in several jurisdictions, and still leaves two large risks— losing your income, or having a child— entirely uninsured, because nobody sells protection against either one.

We created Nomad Citizen as a single membership, priced on age alone rather than your medical history or where you happen to be. It covers your health, travels, income (freelance or from employment) including parental and sick leave, and your family in case you die, plus visa assistance, all in one package. It’s all held together by the promise of a community of people who immediately get you, because they’re working through the same systemic barriers. (Check out a detailed financial breakdown of how the membership stacks up against patching it all together yourself.)

What’s more, you are covered in nearly every unsanctioned country in the world, including the United States. The only stipulation is that you plan to spend more than 6 months out of the year outside of your home country. (The thing that made you slip through the cracks is now exactly the thing that makes you eligible.) 

We believe the connection between protection and place is already breaking up. Nothing about healthcare, income replacement, or time off to look after a newborn is inherently geographic. Those things ended up attached to countries for administrative reasons, at a point in history when knowing where someone was and where they worked was the same thing. That's no longer reliably true. You should be able to move without downgrading your security.

We'd like a safety net to be something you carry rather than something you qualify for. It’s not a replacement for what countries do, but a layer that goes with you, wherever you go.

Nomad Citizen has an age ceiling, an income requirement, waiting periods, and a list of exclusions we'd rather were shorter. We didn’t quite get to retirement. There’s still a lot of scaffolding up, hidden sections under construction.

We'd still rather have this actually in the world than a better version of it languishing in a document. When a system stops being an argument and becomes a thing people actually use to see a doctor, the question shifts from whether it could exist to what it should cover next. That's a much more useful conversation, and it's the one we're now having, mostly with our own members. Helping us shape the ideal experience, they are just as much part of the building process as anyone in the product team.

The cathedral is still going up. But you can walk into it now.