StartUp Lab Stories: Max Tremaine and Sherpaº

By Alex Kinsella

Making international travel easier with Sherpaº co-founder and CEO Max Tremaine

Dreaming of travel can bring images of ornate hotel lobbies, beautiful beaches, and amazing meals in exotic locales around the world. It can also bring nightmares about long lines, lost luggage, and ambiguous documentation requirements. That last challenge—getting the appropriate travel documentation—inspired Max Tremaine to start Sherpa°.

The Toronto-based, venture-backed startup provides global travel requirements and electronic visas to the world's best-known airlines, online travel agencies and travel management companies. Over the past two years, more than two billion travellers have used sherpa° to navigate border crossing complexity.

From graduate to entrepreneur

Entrepreneurship wasn't top of mind for Tremaine when he graduated with a Combined Honours Degree in Psychology, Political Science, and Economics from Wilfrid Laurier University in 2012. Tremaine had pursued the degree thanks to a strong interest in applied behavioural research and had planned to work for Stats Canada after graduating. Unfortunately, Stats Canada had a hiring freeze in 2012, and Tremaine took another opportunity at data and market research leader Nielsen.

"I was able to get great industry expertise, but it also pushed me towards working for a startup rather than a large company. Nielsen is an amazing organization, but you're locked into some fairly straightforward models. You're not there as a consultant, you're there as an analyst—and it's all about the data," Tremaine said.

After Nielsen, Tremaine took a role at a growing startup he had interned at during his studies. The startup grew from a dozen employees to over 100 during his time there. It was there that Tremaine said sparked his interest in building a startup.

Discovering the problem

Tremaine connected with the team at Laurier Launchpad—the predecessor to today's StartUp Lab. He said he valued the practical advice focused on bootstrapping and customer validation.

"It was very practical and focused on de-risking business models and how to do customer interviews," Tremaine said.

The inspiration for Sherpa came from seeing how difficult it was to manage the changing requirements for international border crossings. Tremaine's co-founder Ivan Sharko frequently travelled in Southeast Asia. Tremaine had missed trips because of long visa applications, and they often shared challenges over drinks.

"It's tough to understand what the laws are when you're crossing borders. So we decided to play around with this idea. The Laurier program pushed us to do potential customer interviews and we were very bought into the process and the idea of validating the product and not building anything until we knew that there was a buyer for the potential product," Tremaine said.

Their interviews helped them focus on the core problem that would eventually become the Sherpa° solution. If you're a travel company with customers showing up in an airport without the proper documentation, you're often losing a trip and customer. As a traveller, Tremaine said figuring out what documents you need to travel is challenging.

"Coming from market research, I knew that this was a problem that was likely to keep growing because the shift toward travel openness that had happened in the 90s had reversed in the 2000s. Governments were much more keen on understanding who a traveler was before they boarded a plane," Tremaine said.

The first Electronic Travel Authority system (eTA) was launched in 1996, allowing pre-approval to be issued electronically and linked to the applicant's passport. The eTA system eliminated paper application forms. Between 2012 and 2016, Tremaine said the number of electronic visas and eTAs had doubled. He saw it as an opportunity to automate border-crossing document applications, approvals, and delivery as more countries went paperless.

Sherpa built their product as an application program interface (API) where airlines or other travel companies can quickly build travel requirement info and visa applications into their digital products.

Being held accountable

Tremaine said Laurier enabled the founders to hone that unique value proposition and understand how the business model behind this idea could be feasible. He and Sharko travelled back and forth from Toronto to Waterloo to meet with their advisors and discuss their progress as they worked on refining their idea. Tremaine added that the focus on accountability convinced them Laurier was the right place to be.

"Accountability was the main piece we wanted because we were doing it evenings and weekends at first. It was easy to just kind of get together, have a couple of drinks and think, yeah, this could be awesome. But all that drinking wasn’t getting us far," Tremaine said.

Laurier helped the founders understand if the business was a lifestyle company or had the potential to be something even more significant—including the possibility of venture funding. It was something that Tremaine said he hadn't considered before. He added that the responsibility of being accountable for customer interviews and other research gave them the energy they needed to create what would become Sherpa.

"We called it Sherpa because we are mountain people, and connect with the relentless effort of the Sherpa people. I liked the idea that you didn't have to be a Type A personality to succeed, and that determination and focus would give us an advantage creating an unprecedented product," Tremaine said.

Don't pursue a solution. Pursue a problem

Tremaine's biggest advice for entrepreneurs is not to obsess about the solution. He said their time at Laurier instilled the importance of customer interviews to truly understand their problem before thinking of ways to solve it.

"Who has that problem? How big of a problem is it for them? Are you able to save
somebody some effort or money? This is how you build a business. You become the expert
in the problem. That's one of the reasons the world's best-known travel providers partner with us and entrust us with their most valued asset—their travellers." Tremaine said.

Want to get involved? Ask us how at startuplab@wlu.ca.