Fora Travel
Case study
Shift Lab supports and accelerates start-up’s growth with a rapidly built, robust content and marketing website.
Fora Travel is a new kind of travel agency that empowers travel aficionados to provide travel advisory services.
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Fora Travel is a fast-growing startup transforming the travel industry by enabling travel aficionados to become travel advisors, helping other travelers make the most of their experiences to have the best vacations possible, all while getting paid for their expertise.
Engaging with Shift Lab
Fora engaged with Shift Lab to develop their website, deploy a CMS, and provide ongoing development and maintenance for continuous improvement. Shift Lab put an experienced, dedicated team to work immediately. After conducting strategy sessions to understand Fora’s requirements, Shift provided strategic technology expertise to choose the right components.
Shift Lab used several tools and services to build Fora’s website, including:
Vercel: A cloud platform as a service
NextJS with Typescript: A framework for the web that enables the creation of full-stack web applications
ReactJS: An open-source, front-end JavaScript library for building UI
Contentful: An API-first headless content management system
Using an Agile development process, Shift delivered ongoing incremental, iterative, working website components so that Fora could provide feedback that would guide further development, ensuring that when the website went live, it would be exactly what Fora wanted.
Rapid time to go-live
Fora’s website went live far faster than it would have if Fora had assembled an internal team. The company can easily manage and add new content through the CMS that Shift Lab deployed and customized.
Since the go-live, Fora has continued to accelerate its growth, with higher revenue, more travel advisers, and more customers every month. Finally, with Shift Lab providing ongoing maintenance and development, the site continues to improve, and Fora can focus its resources on the company’s core business and technology.
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Founded in 2021, the company raised its first round of $13.5 million in venture capital funding in August 2022, and while it had developed internal technology to manage its travel advisors — onboarding, payment, and so on — the website was basic and lacked a content management system.
Studio Rodrigo, a design and branding firm, had created an elegant, tech-forward brand for Fora aimed at digitally-literate, avid travelers. But Studio Rodrigo recognized that Fora would need a robust website and content management system. For this task, Studio Rodrigo turned to Shift Lab, its technology partner.
Shift Lab provided a content publishing platform that allows Fora to publish itineraries and advisor content. Additionally, the site includes mechanisms and calls-to-action to allow travelers to easily connect with advisors to book travel, which has a direct impact on revenue -- the more bookings Fora facilitates, the more revenue the company sees. Shift Lab built intuitive mechanisms that enable interested parties to become travel advisors, and the entire site is SEO optimized, with the ability to track its effectiveness in key conversions.
Fora could have used its funding to hire and onboard a web development team, but it would have taken four to six months to recruit, hire and onboard them. Fora couldn’t wait half a year to get started, as the company was already growing fast, and with a public hungry to travel now that the pandemic health restrictions had been lifted, the opportunity was vast.
If Fora wanted to keep the rocket ship it was riding on a growth trajectory, the company needed a full-featured website and content management system (CMS) that would provide customers and advisors with an excellent user experience (UX) as soon as possible.
“Shift Lab has been an incredible partner in supporting us to build our website from the ground up. We have worked with them since our earliest days as a company, and they have grown with us as our needs have expanded,” said Jake Peters, Co-Founder and Chief Product & Technology Officer at Fora.
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