Brainstorm
Every Schengen application asks for the same handful of documents — a cover letter, a day-by-day itinerary, proof of onward travel — and applicants either pay a visa consultant a few hundred dollars to produce them, or lose a weekend fighting Word templates and forum threads about what a given consulate actually wants to see. The starting idea was narrow on purpose: let AI produce the first draft of all three documents from a short trip brief, but never let it be the last step. Nothing should reach a consulate that the traveler hasn’t read and signed off on themselves.
Discovery
The target user is an independent traveler applying to one of 29 Schengen countries, comparing the cost of doing it themselves against a $200–500 consultant fee. That framing set the ceiling on pricing and the floor on trust: the product had to be cheap enough to beat a consultant outright, while being explicit enough about the AI-drafted, human-reviewed split that a first-time applicant wouldn’t worry about submitting something a consulate would reject.
Design
The two-step process — AI drafts, you review and edit, then export — is surfaced as its own card on the homepage rather than buried in an FAQ, because it’s the entire trust proposition. Pricing is tiered by how much of the toolkit an applicant actually needs: a $5 cover-letter-only option for people who just want the writing help, a $29 bundle with the itinerary builder, and a $49 tier that adds dummy flight reservations for the application. Free tools (a visa requirement checker, a trip budget calculator) sit above the paywall as the top-of-funnel.
Build
The itinerary generator maps hotels and transport into a day-wise table rather than free text, since that’s the format consulates are used to scanning. Cover letters are templated per-consulate rather than generic, citing the specific articles a given country’s application expects. Once a visa is sorted, a separate AI destination planner takes over — day-by-day trip plans generated per destination, with visa rules and live flight pricing baked into the same search rather than three separate tabs.
Delivery
Shipped with one-time pricing (no subscription) across three tiers, plus a free-tools funnel for organic acquisition.