Startup Teams Can Now Travel For Free Thanks To Knok

We wrote about Knok’s home sharing platform just before the summer and now to get you jiving ready for fall, Knok is taking things to a new level by offering a one-year free membership to startup teams around the globe (for teams of up to 20 people). To activate the offer, just one team member has to purchase an annual subscription and the rest of the team receives free membership. Considering that the annual membership fee is just under 95 euros per person, this is a very attractive deal.

More than anything, Knok‘s initiative gives entrepreneurial teams the opportunity to take part in the hype that is home sharing, allowing them to house swap (so essentially stay for free) in countless international locations. What the teams get up to when they travel is anyones guess, whether it be to participate in workshops, to study the market or just even to escape on a company “holiday”. The idea actually came from when the Knok team decided to home swap with a San Francisco home owner for a month and a half giving them the opportunity to meet new contacts and also to study a different market from a first hand perspective which helped spur new product ideas.

“This opportunity has been a great source for new ideas, future product features, and it has opened the door to new projects” says Juanjo Rodríguez, co-founder of Knok.com. “Inspiration, discovering other start-up communities, and making new connections are great tools for startups to get ahead of their competitors; that’s why we launched this project to help other startups travel cheaper and stay longer” says Sheera, another Knok team member.

With remote working capabilities becoming more widely adopted, more and more startups are becoming location independent. Take 37 Signals as an example, their small  team is spread over the world. We have also seen startups such as the Y-Combinator grad Vayable which recently sent its California-based team to Paris to get in touch with the local ecosystem, the company’s largest market.

We have also seen similar initiatives happening in other sectors, for example, the London P2P finance start-up TransferWise which recently offered $100 million in free international transfers to the European start-up community.

By making travel, home or office swapping easier, startups have the opportunity to be more connected, more mobile, and better positioned to grow their product faster and further. I can see why the Knok team is so proud of this new initiative.

Knok offers houses for home swapping all over the world so your options are endless. Now all you need to do is convince your team that you really need to go to Tahiti to as the startup ecosystem is booming over there…