Startup Stage: Boundless Life creates communities for digital nomad families

Boundless Life

Boundless Life is a collection of communities comprising private homes, co-working spaces, an education system and recreational hubs for slow-traveling families in destinations around the world.

Founded in 2021, Boundless Life offers packages for digital nomad families in Sintra, Portugal, and Syros, Greece, with locations to open in Italy and Spain by the end of the year.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Boundless Life is a collection of thoughtfully designed communities in beautiful destinations around the world comprised of private homes, co-working spaces, an education system based on experiential learning and locally adapted recreational hubs where like-minded families can develop connections, work, sustainably explore different parts of the world and be immersed in the local cultures.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

We offer one-, three-, six-, nine- and 12-month packages for slow traveling families to live in our communities including our first location in Sintra, Portugal (which launched in February) or one of our imminent openings in Greece, Italy and Spain before the end of 2022.

Our members are all about living boundlessly, while committing, as usual, to their daily responsibilities. Our Boundless Co-Working Hubs are the ideal environment to stimulate creativity, productivity and collaboration. Our members can meet with other professionals in their industry, work on complementary projects, exchange ideas and learn from others’ experiences and knowledge. From a technology standpoint, this means equipping our Co-Working Hubs (and our turnkey residences) with the best high-speed internet and facilitating 24/7 access.

And, while a large aspect of community-building is done in-person, we’re continuously growing our rich online community which includes work, travel and location resources for digital nomad families, and connecting families through our private and highly active online community at each destination.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

• Strengths: Perhaps our biggest differentiator, compared to other co-working and co-living offerings for digital nomads, is our state-of-the-art education system for children ages 1 to 12 based on Finnish and international best practices. We’re offering a first-of-its-kind, truly turnkey solution for travel-loving families with school-aged children. Another strength is the Boundless Life community, which, through communal spaces, activities and events, empowers parents and kids alike to create meaningful bonds in a short period of time and facilitate a mindful and well-balanced lifestyle. This creates a beautiful cooperative movement and peer support amongst parents who know they can count on each other if anything happens, no matter in which country they find themselves.
• Weaknesses: Travel has been quite affected by COVID and therefore, Boundless Life could be affected by situations outside of our control which could restrict the travel industry. However, we are optimistic that our global approach to opening new locations will help to mitigate this risk and allow us to remain flexible as the pandemic evolves. This risk is also tempered by giving families the option to immerse themselves in longer experiences in each location through slow travel.
• Opportunities: Along with the hospitality aspect of Boundless Life, we are creating a network of trusted professionals serving our destinations to help with any immigration issues to facilitate traveling between our destinations. This allows us to offer more services through Boundless and increase our revenue stream. Also, we are creating a Real Estate Fund which allows Boundless families to invest, which will be used to buy properties that will be renovated and rented to Boundless. We are also leveraging different investment programs offered by the governments which in turn facilitate the immigration process for the investors who wish to invest in those countries and support Boundless Life at the same time.
• Threats: As with other players in the travel, tourism and hospitality industry, the evolving nature of COVID and the war in Ukraine are two elements beyond our control that could certainly pose a threat, so we continue to monitor these situations closely.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

With the pandemic, many companies went fully remote, making it possible for people to work from anywhere. With 5G and fiber expanding everywhere, professionals are no longer limited to major urban centers and have the freedom to travel. However, this is not a reality for parents of school-aged children, because their local education systems require children to be in one place during the school year.

Today there are many solutions for childfree digital nomads. When we add children to the equation, things get much more complex.

Boundless Life is creating a new category in the digital nomad space for parents, who want to live around the world while providing the best education to their children. We target families who want to slow travel or live a nomadic lifestyle. And, we take care of many of the intricacies of making this lifestyle a reality by offering a turnkey solution where families can explore the world, embrace the charm and beauty of authentic cultures, connect with nature and form friendships with like-minded families all the while being free from the restrictions of the traditional school year schedule. This lifestyle allows parents to commit to their daily parental responsibilities and work in a stimulating environment while their children experience state-of-the-art education.

In that, Boundless Life provides homes designed specifically with families in mind all within a short walking distance from another; a progressive education system that follows families where they go; a stimulating and collaborative Co-Working Hub, and most importantly, a community families trust and belong to regardless of where they stay.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

As members of the online digital nomad community, a regular pain point we were hearing from digital nomad families was the complexity of providing rich schooling experiences for kids in new locations. Simply being involved in those discussions (talking about our solution to this very real issue) and being active and engaged participants on social media has allowed us to attract most of our customers to date. We have also appeared in several articles from different areas of the world and participated in podcasts and events targeting our audience. We have a podcast in the works, Boundless Conversations, where we interview members of our community and showcase what the Boundless lifestyle is all about and who the families are behind it. We believe that the most powerful marketing comes from honest testimonials and organic referrals within the community. This is why we’re so focused on providing an exceptional experience at Boundless Life.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

After speaking with more than 1,000 families, we realized that there was no solution on the market that could allow families to travel the world and provide a good and constant education system from destination to destination. COVID accelerated trends related to the future of living favorable to the Boundless Life such as remote work, worldwide internet, transformation of education and slow traveling. The events we faced in the past two years made many people rethink their day-to-day lives, and revise their priorities.

Some projections from data scientists at Ladders estimate that by the end of 2022, 25% of professional jobs in the North American market will be remote. This trend is expected to increase in 2023. This only takes into account the North American market and we know that remote working is a worldwide trend.

Several companies have gone completely remote permanently and more are following this trend. This lifestyle is becoming more attractive which enabled us to create a new category, Boundless Living. We estimate our target market to represent a 500 bi opportunity.

How and when will you make money?

Most of our revenue comes from renting properties on a long-term basis and offering premium services for the families living in our Boundless communities such as weekly cleaning services for the apartments, community experiences, airport pick-up/drop-off, access to a network of trusted lawyers to help with visa issues, a general manager available 24 hours if any issues arise as well as a concierge service that helps the customers with whatever needs they have.

We launched the first destination and received our first families in February and have already achieved 1.5 mi run rate. We are fully booked for our Sintra, Portugal, and our recently launched Syros, Greece, destinations in June and in July and 80% booked in August.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Mauro Repacci, the co-founder and CEO, has been working in real estate and travel since he was 14 years old. He spent many years in M&A in the travel industry and worked for Air Canada before becoming a serial entrepreneur and expanding his family’s real estate investment business.

After completing his MBA and living in several countries of the world, Mauro went on to build a career helping people to relocate into their ideal neighborhoods. Mauro and Marcos co-founded and exited two companies in prop-tech. One being the first online relocation platform that helped more than one million people find new homes.

Mauro has been featured in several tech events, has raised millions of dollars from top angel investors and exited two companies. He also served as mentor, investor and advisor for several tech companies.

Marcos Carvalho, co-founder and head of demand generation, is a serial entrepreneur, advisor, angel investor and coach to several successful entrepreneurs. Together with Mauro, they built and exited their last two award-winning prop-tech companies. Marcos is a global citizen and fervent slow traveler. He was raised in the hospitality industry and worked for 14 years for an event company acquired by the second largest group in the industry.

He is passionate about education and developing the entrepreneurial spirit in children and sat on the board of Junior Achievement Quebec and other NGOs following the same purpose.

Elina Zois, co-founder and customer experience lead, is a proven marketing leader whose passion lies in creating loyalty through innovative marketing and customer engagement. After completing her MBA, she moved back to Europe and became a leader in hospitality overseeing a portfolio of more than 700 Marriott International properties and recognized as “Women to watch in hospitality.” Elina has over 14 years of experience in brand management, multi-channel advertising, email marketing partnerships and sponsorship activations.

Rekha Magon, co-founder and Boundless’ head of student experience, is a leader in the alternative education movement and an award-winning ed tech CEO (9th Edtech Innovation Summit). Rekha worked as a senior auditor at KPMG for many years before leaving corporate life to launch her award-winning ed-tech company the Mindful Scholar. With the vast research she accumulated on various types of alternative education, Rekha created a homeschool framework and action plan to help other families live beyond their boundaries and use the world as their classroom. She was also recruited to help an alternative learning center in Montreal rooted in the MIT Media Lab’s four pillars of creative pedagogy.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Half of our founding members are women and more than 70% of our team is composed of women. We are from different ethnic backgrounds and this is also true of our families participating in the Boundless Life.

We hire local talent in all of our destinations and destinations-to-be so every destination mirrors the reality of the country where we are establishing.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

To keep up with demand and launch destinations fast enough to enable families to keep traveling without having to go back home.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?

Boundless is positioned in a niche market and doesn’t have direct competition. While there are some digital nomad services aimed at families, no others offer a similar educational system - the first-of-its-kind designed to follow families where they go. We leverage the Finish system of education, ranked as one of the best ones for early ages and we designed an aged-based curriculum broken down into three-month quests so kids can do quests in different parts of the world and continue their education. It’s a very progressive system that prepares children for real life and the future. It’s based on experiential and sensory learning, project-based learning leveraging the UN sustainability challenges, it’s culture-based and enables a very personalized approach due to small groups and highly qualified tutors.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

We have just closed a seed round of $2 million at the end of 2021 with some of our investors including Anges QC and IDEA Fund; we even received scout cheques from Lightspeed and Sequoia. Our investors are very happy with what we have achieved so far and we receive continued requests from investors to participate in our Series A.

By mid-next year, we plan to have five locations including Tuscany, Bali and Costa Rica. This would mean that by next year, we estimate to have between 150 families at all times.

What is your end-game? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc)

With five locations open in one year, 30 locations in three years, and 100 locations in five years, we are creating a new category, Boundless Living. Our vision is that in the near future people will proudly say that they live the Boundless Life. We are creating the worldwide structure so that we can democratize this lifestyle.