Irish ‘digital nomads’ couple help travellers avoid culture shock

An Irish couple, John and Dee Lee, have launched an app, CultureMee, that offers cultural insights as well as practical travel advice. It currently covers more than 70 locations – every country in Europe and 12 of the most visited destinations outside Europe, with more being added – and has been downloaded by 3,000 users.

“The idea came when we were travelling around East Africa in 2015,” Dee says. Initially it was prompted by the couple’s frustrations with obtaining practical advice on basics such as “plugs for all the different countries we were visiting”, as well as the time consuming research for visas and vaccinations.

“We decided that there needed to be an app where you could get all this very straightforward practical travel advice ... and we quickly realised that culture also had to be a core part of our app.”

But rather than take a formal, guide-book approach to culture, the couple concentrate on popular culture, and the lives of those living in their featured destinations. “There are thousands of apps for booking hotels, flights and packages, but really very little focused on people, and that is at the heart of what we’re doing with CultureMee.”

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The culture content is a mixture of historical background, contemporary commentary, and what the couple describe as “tips on how to avoid culture shock”. Videos, filmed by John and presented by Dee, are being rolled out to augment the culture element of the app. Country-specific etiquette knowledge, and pointers on how to interact with the locals, generate plenty of helpful material.

“We did thousands of structured (scheduled interviews) and unstructured (for example, meeting people on the bus) interviews with people from different cultures, to ask them how they saw their own culture. We were lucky that Amsterdam, where we lived, has an incredible mix of different cultures.

"The Compare Your Culture section is based on research from culture expert Dr Hofstede which we have licensed from Hofstede Insights (hofstede-insights.com). However, what we do is make the text snappy and mobilefriendly."

The couple both trained as accountants in Dublin. Dee went on to work in investment banking, with Lehman Brothers in London, while John worked for CRH in Dublin and Amsterdam. They are also widely travelled. “I’ve travelled to over 60 countries, while John isn’t far behind me. John also speaks six foreign languages (four fluently), and we have both lived in a number of different countries,” Dee says.

They have been working on the app for two years – Dee since May 2015 and John, in a full-time capacity, since December 2016 – and are currently in Asia, on an extended research trip, accompanied by their one-year-old daughter, Rosa.

“We’re digital nomads at the moment. In the last two months we’ve been to Malaysia, Thailand, India, Australia and New Zealand. We had planned to live in Bali for six months, but the volcano put a stop to that. We’re returning to Ireland full-time in March 2018, most likely to Leitrim.”

Building a community around culture and travel is part of the couple’s vision for their project. “By focusing on creating a community, we can encourage the community to create their own culture stories and their own perspectives about how they see culture.

“Think of the next time someone from Canada wants to travel to Ireland ... they would click on the culture videos, and see a video by an Irish person explaining Irish culture (we’re very friendly people, we love the craic and enjoy meeting up in the pub, we don’t like conflict), and also a video by a non-Irish person explaining Irish culture (for example, a German explaining that Irish are friendly, but are also quite indirect, and so on).”

Part of their plan for community involvement is to crowd-source information and video footage, and they have protocols in place to safeguard the veracity and legitimacy of the information shared.

“We have three layers of protection built into the platform. We have automated tools to help prevent inappropriate content such as pornography. Users can flag inappropriate videos. John and I will be monitoring the video content ourselves, too. Users will only be able to upload videos once they have downloaded the CultureMee app, which is an additional protection. This also helps to a degree with authentication.

“If users upload inappropriate or copyrighted material, we will be very vigilant and will take immediate action. If the manual monitoring workload becomes too much for John and me, we also have access to a remote team to help manually check videos.”

The app is currently free to download, so how are they financing the venture? “We have two revenue models already built in to the existing app. We receive commissions from our business partners, Hofstede Insights, when we send them traffic, so for example if someone wants to speak to a culture consultant, they click on a button in our app, I will get in contact with them and refer them on to a culture consultant from Hofstede Insights (they have culture consultants all over the world). We also receive commissions from Hofstede Insights if someone downloads and pays for the Culture Compass app (a separate app listed on our main menu).

“Medium-term, we will obviously have to look at advertising or in-app purchases (for example, potentially charging for the business section), but we want to avoid that if at all possible for the moment, to keep the interface clean and user-friendly and to build a community faster.”

See culturemee.com