Testing the member experience.
By the Shutdown Hero team
What we built
We’ve built an internal prototype of the Shutdown Hero member experience. It uses fictional information, doesn’t connect to any real accounts, and moves no money.
The prototype lets us walk through the journey a member would take: learning about the membership and getting set up, what happens when a shutdown interrupts pay, and how things wrap up after the shutdown ends.
What we’re testing
A journey that works when everything goes smoothly is the easy part. Most of our time has gone into the harder situations: a check that needs a person to review it, a detail that changes partway through, or a shutdown that doesn’t affect everyone the same way.
Working through those situations shows us where the experience needs to be clearer, and where a person should step in to help.
What it’s helping us decide
Each situation raises questions about eligibility, verification, timing, and how the program would work in practice. The prototype gives us a concrete way to test proposed approaches and identify the decisions we’ll need to work through with potential banking partners before launch.
What comes next
Next, we’ll keep refining the experience as we learn, and use what the prototype has shown us to prepare for discussions with potential banking partners.
Membership and financial assistance aren’t available yet, and we haven’t announced a launch date. Pricing, eligibility, funding, and any financing or repayment terms are still being developed.
If you’re on the early-access list, we’ll email you when early access opens.