We Roam sold nomads a year abroad — lawsuits stranded them mid-journey

A travel startup that organised year-long, twelve-country work-and-travel circuits for 'digital nomads': apartments, offices and airfares for $2,000 a month plus a deposit.

That aspiring digital nomads would prepay about $2,000 a month — tens of thousands a year — for arranged lodging, workspaces and flights across 12 countries.

Founder savings and loans only — the co-founders never raised venture money.

Nathan Yates, a New York corporate lawyer, and Sean Harvey, a Yelp salesperson, founded We Roam in 2016 to sell the nomad dream: a year of travel without quitting your job.

In February 2018, mid-circuit, the company renamed itself WY_CO under a settlement with Roam International, and Remote Year's February 2017 trade-secrets suit was costing 'large sums of compensation'. The rename wrecked brand recognition and search visibility: June signups came in at less than half of January's. Yates discovered the company had one to two months of cash left; an investor hunt failed.

In late April 2018, with customers on stop five of twelve in Florianópolis, Yates emailed 'our dream, our family, our company can no longer continue'. Travelers were stranded abroad with no guaranteed lodging or way home. A customer-built spreadsheet logged 33 people owed about $107K; PayPal refunded a few; co-founder Sean Harvey filed personal bankruptcy in August 2018, discharging over $280K of debt.

A self-funded, prepay business model left no cushion when litigation began eating the cash that belonged to future trips.

The Remote Year trade-secrets suit imposed 'large sums of compensation' the thin balance sheet could not absorb.

The court-ordered rebrand to WY_CO destroyed the search visibility and word-of-mouth funnel a referral-driven travel business lives on.

Customers had prepaid a year of their lives, but as unsecured creditors they sat behind lenders when the assets were divided.

Prepaying customers makes them unsecured creditors: a service company that holds a year of customers' money and plans needs a cushion and a clean name to survive a lawsuit.

As of the December 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek story, Yates was trying to sell the company's IP to repay customers while living in Africa and restructuring his own debts; one customer, Erin Sweeney, won a $4,550 default judgment in an Illinois small-claims court, though collection was uncertain. Customers who paid through PayPal got refunds; none reported direct reimbursement from the company.