When we assembled our team at the start of 2024, we set out to release our product early, so we could learn as quickly as possible. We wanted to gather user feedback, validate our market assumptions, and iterate our features based on real-world trip planning—classic startup playbook. 

In April, after three months of building, we released it into production. This was our Alpha release. It was early, and the product had a lot of shortcomings, but we were pleasantly surprised with the positive response we got from so many travellers.

From day one, we aimed to build a product that is flexible and versatile. “No two trips are the same,” was one of our core guiding principles. This mentality allowed our early adopters to test their use cases, and gave us the chance to see how people want to use the tool in the wild to better understand whose problems we could really solve.

As we kept evolving the product, we gained new clarity on the potential value and opportunity in front of us. We paired that new awareness with what we know best—building B2B software that serves the needs of both users and their companies. And, with a team that knows work travel first hand (and is actively using Finch daily), we’re able to draw from our own experiences as well.

Now in beta 🤘

And it’s with this that we moved our product into its next phase: As of August 2024, we are officially in Beta. 🎉

With the transition to Beta, our mission has new clarity—to help companies cut planning inefficiencies, increase the value of group work travel, and gain control over their complete travel spend. This strategic focus aims to evolve how planning gets done, enhance employee travel experience, and help teams budget, analyse, and forecast travel costs. 

We are building a travel tool for work that works for everyone. Whether helping an executive assistant cut their planning and coordination time in half, ensuring a manager maximises quality team-building time at an offsite, or giving a CFO the ability to capture all projected trip expenses, not only transit and lodging.

We aim to move beyond the corporate travel tools built for a procurement department, often at the expense of every employee who needs to actually use the tool.

A new identity 💅

With all these changes also comes a new identity—a name to be specific. Also as of August, we’re moving on from GatherGo, and are now Finch. 

Finch captures perfectly who we are and aspire to be: Agile, evolved, and fast moving. Laser-focused on our vision to build the leading travel platform to get your flock together. Darwin’s finches were known for their remarkable adaptability and specialisation, which is exactly what we aim to be for the distributed companies of today and tomorrow. 

We’re very excited to grow into our new name.

A refined sense of customer 💫

Speaking of distributed companies, we’ve gotten much more opinionated on who our ideal customer is (and isn’t). 

We’re still working to serve small to medium-sized businesses, though what really matters is how your company travels. 

Talking with potential customers, it’s always great to see them realise all the travel use cases they have: Offsites, QBRs, sales trips, in-person employee onboarding, customer visits, client workshops, conference trips…the list goes on and on. 

Importantly, we’re very focused on distributed companies. Whether that means multiple national or global offices, or a fully or partially remote workforce. When employees are spread out, the value in in-person gatherings goes up. 

And of course, the TMCs of yesterday were not built for the reality of today’s distributed teams. 

We want to enable more companies to plan those gatherings better. If you’ve got any trips coming up, we’d love to show you what Finch can do to help (one more plug to book a call with Steve and me). 

A new roadmap 🗺️

Our delivery plans for the remainder of 2024 align with this new strategy. As you continue to use Finch, you’ll notice new features and functionality that will make it feel more like a system for work. And with those improvements, we hope you’ll all find a lot more targeted value for trip planning and execution. 

Have ideas? Things you’d like to see prioritised? We’d love to hear from you. Email me at craig@finch.travel or book a call with me and Steve here.

Onward 💪

We’re thrilled with our new direction, and hope it resonates with you. We’re still encouraging anyone to log in and play with the tool—you can get right in at app.finch.travel.

We hope you find our current product useful, and enjoy watching it evolve, grow, and improve every two weeks.

Welcome to Finch, where the future of work travel begins.