Insured Nomads is essentially one of the first companies I have ever worked with in an advisory capacity. Put simply, Insured Nomads insures the world’s global companies and workers. It all started with a podcast episode with the founder, Andrew Jernigan, on April 1st, 2020. I invited him on because I thought his company, Insured Nomads, was bound to have a rapid spike due to COVID, which was rampant at the time. Little did I know that this little podcast interview would lead to one of my most special startup relationships I’ve made in the last decade.

I had him on my podcast, and then six or so months later without engaging with each other, I saw that he signed up for my newsletter called Forward Thinking at the time.

The same day, I saw he signed up for my founder community, Forward Thinking City.

Clearly, he wanted to plug into my ecosystem. And I was glad! I enjoyed the podcast convo and wanted to see how I could potentially help with Insured Nomads. Since he engaged with my stuff, we decided to hop on a call to catch up.

On that call, Andrew was talking to me about this one investor who expressed interest in Insured Nomads, Elizabeth Yin, GP at Hustle Fund. I already knew her at the time so I shot her a Twitter DM and vouched for him. I liked him and I like the company.

Her response.

And after some more chatting, we decided it would be a good idea for me to come on as an advisor for Insured Nomads.

Elizabeth eventually invested in Insured Nomads a week later (she was their first investor) and I came on as an advisor to help them with the rest of their round. I’ll spare the in-depth details and will avoid putting every single relevant screenshot from our relationship, but I essentially became an intro machine for Insured Nomads from that point on. And we had calls every step of the way to show him the “the game” of Silicon Valley.

It started off with a Forward Thinking City demo day, where Andrew pitched and gained a couple of checks from Dave Goldblatt and Stuart Sim. Those were $10k each. Some time passed as we worked on his fundraising pitch and positioning. Then in mid 2021, the intros start ramping up as their business is ramping up.

Intros include:

In short, all of those people ended up investing.

1. Kenny invested $50,000

2. Jeremy invested $243,000

3. Sam Invested $2,500

4. John//Ali/Stonks invested $50,000

5. John Diaz invested $15,000

Over time going into 202 and 2023, we built out the Seedscout product and he started getting intros to investors on autopilot, without me in the middle of it. All our calls and coaching sessions were starting to pay off as he closed more of and more of the investors as he learned “the game”. He learned it, and play he did.

Andrew told me Seedscout is responsible for over $750,000 raised for Insured Nomads, across 17 different investors, over the course of several years. Wow! Talk about an impact. But this post isn’t supposed to highlight the funding amount. It’s not why I care, to be honest. Here’s why I care about this case study…

Andrew knew absolutely nothing about fundraising when I first met him. He is not from the Bay Area. He was a wide eyed founder with big dreams but no idea how to capitalize the company to get there. He had all the wrong assumptions, just like every founder does when they start. But through maybe 30 virtual convos of just talking through the raise and different situations, he skilled up and figured it out. He made mistakes, but he learned from them. And over time, he brought in millions to Insured Nomads.

When we met, he was bootstrapped. As of the time of this writing, Insured Nomads has raised $3.2M. He has dozens of incredible investors on the cap table. They are on their way to building a generational company. I am just happy that Seedscout was able to play a role in helping them with this leg of the mission. I am confident they’ll be able to finish the whole mission and make the world for global travelers and expats safer. Onward!