How SafetyWing Doubled ARR to $24M and Reached 25,000 Active Policies (Interview with Co-Founder and CEO Sondre Rasch)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Started thinking about it in 2017, ultimately launched in 2018, broke a million dollars in revenue in 2019, now doing $24,000,000 in terms of run rate up from 12,000,000 just a year ago. Safetywing is digital nomad insurance, right? You go get it in an issue in Europe when you're traveling, it's a 2 ks bill, They've got you protected. They're hoping to build a global safety net, right? And really enable digital nomads to thrive and flourish wherever they

00:21are. Last raise of $35,000,000 Series B in 2022 at a 195,000,000 post called a 16x multiple looking to scale today with their team of 60 as they keep trying to build that net. My guest today is Sondre Rasch. He's the co founder and CEO of safetywing and host of safetywing's Building Remotely podcast to guide on how to build and scale a remote company. His educational background is in economics and computer science and previously was a policy

00:44advisor for the government of Norway working on their social safety net. He's also the cofounder of SuperSide, a platform for freelance designers. Alright. Sondre, ready to take us to the top?

Sondre's Background and Leaving Superside

Sondre Rasch

00:53>> Let's go. I feel

Nathan Latka

00:55like I see that purple wavy SuperSide logo all over the place. When did you leave that company for safetywing?

Sondre Rasch

01:01>> So that was back in twenty twenty seventeen, 2018. But of course, it's still run by my co founders. So I keep keep get some regular updates, and, you know, it's it's a great company. It's great, and they're doing really well.

Nathan Latka

01:14So where did you discover the problem that you're now solving at safetywing? Was it at super side?

Discovering the Problem SafetyWing Solves

Sondre Rasch

01:19>> Twenty sixteen, right after I called me, for me and Fred, you know, we we both came from policy, so we noticed that the freelancers had this problem of income uncertainty and not having benefits. So we looked into providing benefits for the freelancers on the platform. We find that we found that nobody offered this, and we also realized why, which is essentially that the internet labor market, like, you know, it's global, goes across borders, but all the

01:48>> infrastructure that supports the labor market kind of works as if it's local. Mhmm. And so a lot of the infrastructure just doesn't work, right? So it's like, if you're hiring a freelancer from Guatemala, they will not qualify for your social safety net, obviously. So so, yeah. So it has to be rebuilt in this global digital way, that's what we set out to do.

Nathan Latka

02:08Interesting. So you thought you sense this is an opportunity. You leave Superside. You launch What year was that? 2017. 2017. Okay. And then I guess walk me through your first customers. Was it the Superside team, or how'd you land your first customers?

First Customers and Early Product

Sondre Rasch

02:26>> No. I funny. It actually took me a couple of years to get to make the product so that Superside could use it. So, you know, we started out and we're like I I took my own experience, which was making the Norwegian Social Safety Net. And the idea was, let's set make something like a Norwegian Social Safety Net, but available on the Internet as a membership. But we have to start somewhere. So let's, like, make one little

02:48>> piece, and then we kinda build out, you know, health, retirement, disability, you know, each part until we make a membership at the end. So we, you know, we we talk to users, and they essentially said, okay. Health was the top thing, and then we, you know, we decided on this kind of influencer segment of remote work, which are the digital nomads. And I knew that segment very well. I was sort of part of it, and so

03:13>> was Sondre Rasch, my cofounders. So we made Nomad Insurance, and and that was our first customers. That, however, didn't cover home country, so it couldn't be used by Supersize. It was only when we, two years later, launched Remote Health that we signed up, you know, where the where I discovered the problem, and they're, you know, now one of our biggest customers, 0%.

Nathan Latka

03:35Interesting. Okay. So so you're just to be clear, you're selling, I mean, the earliest, the digital ads directly. So one off $10 a month plans, or are you selling big enterprise packages to the operating company?

Sondre Rasch

03:47>> Like the first thing you said, it's it's this directly to the digital nomads, $40.45 dollars a month plan on a subscription. So they come to our website and they buy it, and they have subscription. And that works kind of out of the gate, and it's in 2020 that we made this company option where and that we did we actually did that because we had so many requests to do it. So a lot of companies reached out

04:12>> and said, hey, this Nomad thing, it's a global health insurance fact, that looks cool. I wanna buy that for my global team. And then we said, after we got that request a 100 times, we said we we gotta build it. So we've

Nathan Latka

04:25Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually, saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

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How Nomad Insurance Works for Travelers

Nathan Latka

05:34not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're

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06:22you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. If you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the interview.

06:50How does someone listening right now might go, man, I'm a digital nomad. I totally understand. I don't wanna pay Blue Cross Blue Shield $600 a month that only covers The US, but I'm in Chile, I'm in Europe all the time. How do I if I get a cut in Europe, how do I go to Europe Hospital? How does how do you solve that problem for $45 a month?

Sondre Rasch

07:06>> Well,

07:09>> so we

07:12>> The US is an outlier on cost here. So everyone who comes from a US perspective always thinks that anything outside of The US is like remarkably cheap. And, you know, that's a whole little- that's a whole little segment on its own, like why that is.

07:33>> Just to drop the thing that I think is really missing from the debate that I've noticed making this product, is that the medical provider networks in The US charge a very high price. And internationally, medical provider networks have chart have no price, but it's like a majority of the cost of an insurance in The US. But that's anyway, that's more of fun fact.

Nathan Latka

07:53Yeah. Like, how do you use it? I'm in Europe. I'm I'm using it in The US, but I'm in Europe traveling. I I I cut my toe on the beach. Need to go to the hospital and get stitches. How do I use safetywing?

Claims Experience and User Flow

Sondre Rasch

08:01>> You just so typically, the user experience would be like this. You would call or, you know, send us a message on the chat, and, you know, it would be directed to a nearby hospital, you know, and they the hospital would bill us directly after nearby private hospitals. So that's that's typically how it would be. In another situation where you don't reach out to us, you would go there, then they might not be able to bill us

08:24>> directly, because some hospitals internationally are not able to. So maybe then you would pay out of pocket, and then you would go to a website and and get the money transferred back to you after. So those

Nathan Latka

08:34are people do that, though. Isn't that like a bunch of work? I mean, do do people actually do that?

Sondre Rasch

08:39>> Yeah. People people do that. I mean, people use this whenever something happens. I mean, you get your money back, so why not?

Nathan Latka

08:46I just I hear this all the time, right? I have to go in and, the bill at the hot you know, the bill at the whatever for the medicine is a $100. And they say, oh, well, like, we can't approve insurance today, but just send the receipt to your safetywing and they'll I'm like, you know what? I'm not gonna the time to go to the safetywing website and upload the receipt and try and fight to get

09:02a refund. Like, how many how many of these have you processed in terms of, like, total dollar volume over the past thirty days?

Sondre Rasch

09:13>> I don't have that number top of mind. But I would say that, you know, here we're not unique compared to any other insurance company, which is that, you know, the scenario you're describing,

09:25>> it it it is true. Right? Then I might not do that as well. If I have something that is 50 or $100, maybe I can't even be bothered to to, you know, upload the receipt and get the the the reimbursement. But that's not, I wouldn't, that's not why I would have the insurance, because sometimes you have that thing that costs 2,000 or maybe sometimes you have that thing that costs 20,000 or maybe you can't get the

09:46>> treatment without having insurance, or maybe you need to be evacuated to another hospital. Like, it's the more serious things where you definitely, you know, would use the insurance than what that would be for. That said though, for that, just, you know, talking to a primary care physician for $50 scenario, we are making later this year, hopefully, we'll be ready something called like a safetywing card so that you can pay then at the point of purchase with

10:12>> the safetywing card. So even if you're not referred there by us, you don't have to pay out of pocket, and that I think will improve the user experience on that sort of scenario you're describing.

Pricing History and Current Rate

Nathan Latka

10:22Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And you start you said you started pricing back in 2017 at about $45 a month. Have you edited that at all, is today the average customer paying $45 a month?

Sondre Rasch

10:30>> Today, it's $45 a month. It was 35 when we started out. So I've got inflation adjustments.

Active Policies and Key Metrics

Nathan Latka

10:39Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So you launched, obviously, the team plans, I think you said in 2020. You're now scaling today. How many customers or how many seats? How many folks are protected by safetywing today?

Sondre Rasch

10:51>> Active policies, like, last month is about 25,000.

Nathan Latka

10:55Is that your main, like, I guess, sort of OKR metric for the companies or something else I'm not asking about that that you actually care more about?

Sondre Rasch

11:04>> No. That's about right. So sometimes we count people and sometimes we count revenue, but, you know, it's just one is the other times price. So that's that's that. And the other one is NPS. You know, one to 10, would you recommend this to a friend?

Nathan Latka

11:18Sondre, if I if I take 25,000, right, policyholders at $45 a month, that would mean you're doing about 1,100,000 a month in revenue.

Revenue and Growth Rate

Sondre Rasch

11:28>> The so we also have another product that is higher priced, remote health, health insurance for remote teams and individuals. So, like, those 25,000, a section of those is paying a higher price point.

Nathan Latka

11:39Okay. So you guys are doing more than more than 1,000,000 a month in revenue then?

Sondre Rasch

11:42>> Yeah. That's great. Like, quite as much. Yeah. We're Twice as much.

Nathan Latka

11:47Wow. Okay. So about 2,000,000 a month or 24,000,000 run rate. Where were you exactly a year ago so we can calculate growth rate?

Sondre Rasch

11:53>> But we've doubled. There's a 2022 versus 2021. I looked it up the other day. That's two x.

Nathan Latka

11:58Wow. That's incredible. I would think that a lot of your your growth would have come from people wanting to protect themselves from COVID if they were traveling internationally, and that that sort of died off. But you've been able to maintain growth, it sounds like.

COVID Impact on the Business

Sondre Rasch

12:11>> Yeah. So I mean, COVID for us was a mixed blessing. So one is we launched remote health right before it was amazing, and, you know, everyone switched to remote it accelerated the advent of remote work by five years. But two, digital nomads, first, it was very bad because a third of our customers evacuated and we lost them. A huge drop. And then but then come August in 2020, we had this massive growth, 3x in five months,

12:39>> due to introducing COVID coverage, which is kind of like your point there. So, for us it was like a mixed bag, it's like a roller coaster, where in some cases things became suddenly amazing, and then in some cases it was terrible, and existential crisis, and then it was great again. So yeah. But, like, over the long run, what COVID did was definitely accelerate remote work, which is fundamentally good for us.

Nathan Latka

13:04Sondre, you launched in 2017. How many years did it take you to hit a million bucks in revenue? Do you remember?

Sondre Rasch

13:09>> We launched in 2018. So 2017 was just when I started tinkering with that idea.

Nathan Latka

13:14Okay. 2018 was when we launched.

Sondre Rasch

13:16>> It was about a year, a little over a year. Yeah.

Path to First Million in Revenue

Nathan Latka

13:20So let's call it 2019 then, but passing the million run rate. Very cool. What's growth look like? I mean, what do you do next? Right? You've got a massive install base of $25,000. You can focus on upselling them, or you can focus on doubling the install base from 25 to 50. How do you think generally?

Growth Strategy and Future Plans

Sondre Rasch

13:35>> You know, it's it's about both of those. So, you know, our vision is to build this global social safety net, which is a massively more ambitious product. And we definitely want to, at some point, upsell, you know, everyone part of our Nomad users to be like, hey. How about this membership product? Which is priced higher, but you get, like, way more stuff.

13:54Yeah.

13:54>> Way better. So, you know, that's that's what that's half of the answer. And the other half, but like in day to day, a lot of it is just focused on, you know, improving small customer places, improving the claims experience like we talked about, and and scaling the growth channels, the ambassador program, platform API, and sales. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

14:12That makes tons of sense. Talk to me real quick about capitalization. Have you bootstrapped or raised?

Capitalization and Funding Rounds

Sondre Rasch

14:17>> We have raised. So we've raised a total of $53,000,000, actually, quite a bit through a series of rounds. So we raised we did Y Combinator in 2018, seed round, three and a half, 2019. In 2020, series a, 8,000,000. And now in 2020, Series B, 35,000,000.

Nathan Latka

14:36Sorry. That was 35,000,000 in 2020?

Sondre Rasch

14:39>> 2022.

Nathan Latka

14:402022. Okay. Did you were you able to sort of get that done before valuations compress significantly? I mean, most people in the Series B are selling, like, 10% of the company. Were you sort of in that same range?

Sondre Rasch

14:49>> Yeah.

14:50>> No. No. It was, like, it was it was more. It was, like, I might as well say it. I think the, like, post when evaluation was, like, one ninety five. I don't think I've said that anywhere else, but that was what it was.

Nathan Latka

15:01Sondre, we love that. Come on. We love we love breaking news, breaking new data. That's great. Would you do you have any issues today of people going, shit. My options are underwater because valuations have compressed so much?

Sondre Rasch

15:11>> No. No. No. We we raised, like things were already falling in April. Okay. So it was not, like, payday race. It was it was, like, everyone was, like, looking. People are canceling meetings. It was already it it was it hasn't fully taken the plunge, but it was plungy environment when we raised that one.

Nathan Latka

15:29It's the first time I've heard that word, plungy environment. That's good.

Sondre Rasch

15:32>> And look, we can back

Nathan Latka

15:33that up with data. Right? You're doing about a $12,000,000 run rate, and the 1 95 post would be 16.2 x multiple. I'd say that's fair. That's not crazy.

Sondre Rasch

15:42>> No. It's no. It was not a crazy multiple. It was it was within normal. Like, I I remember when we started thinking about the fundraise in 2021, I heard this from the very much where I was like, okay. 10 x multiple, and then someone was like, no. No. It's 100 x now.

Nathan Latka

15:58Yeah. It's it's insane. It's crazy. Well, no. It sounds like you've done this in a very capital efficient way, also not gotten crazy, which is great. Listen. We're out of time here. Guess before we wrap up with the famous five, if people wanna learn more about safetywing, where can they find you?

Team Size and Engineering Headcount

Sondre Rasch

16:10>> So if you're a nomad or you have a remote team and you wanna offer them benefits, you know, go to safetywing.com. And definitely also check out the podcast, building remotely, where we're to build a knowledge base on how to build and scale a remote team.

Nathan Latka

16:22That's great. And real quick, team size today, how many full time?

Sondre Rasch

16:26>> 60.

Nathan Latka

16:2760. Or how many engineers?

Sondre Rasch

16:30>> 20.

Nathan Latka

16:31That's great. Alright. Famous Five here. Number one, favorite book?

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Sondre Rasch

16:34>> Beginning of Infinity by David Butch.

Nathan Latka

16:37Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Sondre Rasch

16:40>> Some Ultimate OpenAI.

Nathan Latka

16:42Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building safetywing?

Sondre Rasch

16:47>> Probably Teamflow, which unfortunately is getting that sold, but it's our virtual office software.

Nathan Latka

16:54Number four. How many hours of sleep do get every night?

Sondre Rasch

16:57>> Eight.

Nathan Latka

16:58That's good. And situation, married, single kids?

Sondre Rasch

17:02>> Married. With wife is just pregnant.

Nathan Latka

17:07Oh, congratulations. That's extremely exciting. Alright. Get on the way. And how old are you?

Sondre Rasch

17:11>> 36.

Nathan Latka

17:12Last question. Something you wish knew when you were 20. To

Sondre Rasch

17:19>> go straight for the thing that I most wanted instead of, like, doing kind of like a learning path.

Nathan Latka

17:28Guys, there I have it. Started thinking about it in 2017, ultimately launched in 2018, broke a million dollars in revenue in 2019, now doing $24,000,000 in terms of run rate up from 12,000,000 just a year ago. Safetywing is digital nomad insurance, right? They go get it in an issue in Europe when you're traveling, it's a 2 ks bill, they've got you protected. They're hoping to build a global safety net, right? And really enable digital nomads to

17:49thrive and flourish wherever they are in the world. Last raised a $35,000,000 series b in 2022 at a $195,000,000. One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it,

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