Travel for the Creator Economy
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Hello, Acquired LPs. Welcome to another great installment of the LP Show. This is a first for David and I here today. We had a company on, it's a PSL Ventures portfolio company called Trovatrip. Nick and Lauren, the founders there, and I am on the board. And so it was a very fun conversation that is extremely close to home for me. What did I say? I asked them, you know, how it's going. And I was like, well, clearly you and Ben don't hate each other at this point. I meant that as a joke. Yeah.

And it landed like a lead balloon, David. Who could hate Ben? He's the best. Yeah, I was like, no, it's great.

It was great. No, the conversation was fun because the company bootstrapped for a couple of years before raising capital. And we talked a lot about lessons learned from bootstrapping that force you to build a business with a lot of super positive characteristics when you're sort of, you must have that discipline or you will die and you don't have the luxury of venture dollars. And we talk a lot about how that has sort of transitioned now that they have product market fit. This is a really great story. I mean, for me, hearing about it from you secondhand over the past year, but...

It's a great story. They built a great business. Totally. And of course, we talk a lot of creator economy stuff since this is sort of at the merger of travel and the creator economy.

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Like Vanta's 7,000 customers around the globe, and go back to making your beer taste better, head on over to vanta.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. And thanks to friend of the show, Christina, Vanta's CEO, all Acquired listeners get $1,000 of free credit. Vanta.com slash acquired. Lauren and Nick, welcome to the Acquired LP Show. Thank you so much for having us. Yeah, good to be here.

Well, this is a very close one to home for me, listeners, to wave my arms around real big up front. I am on the board with Lauren and Nick of Trovatrip and get to work with them super closely on behalf of PSL Ventures. And I was just loving some of the conversations we were having the last couple weeks. And they have a super interesting founding journey and business on their hands. And so...

I suppose the first thing I'll ask just to set the table a little bit for listeners is, Lauren and Nick, what is Trovatrip? We are a consumer group travel company that, believe it or not, managed to actually grow through the pandemic.

But at a high level, so we are a platform enabling creators to host group trips around the globe with their audience. So if you imagine a yoga teacher is interested to host a yoga retreat to Bali, they can use our platform to find yoga itineraries offered by certified tour operators in Bali and then leverage our platform to build a trip microsite, sell spots, process payments, and manage bookings pre-trip. So basically take all the headaches out of building a group travel business. Yeah.

That's great. And so how do you categorize that? Is it a marketplace? Is it a platform? How do you think about the, what is the business? Yeah, that's a good question. So it certainly evolved over time since we started it back in December of 2017 is when we went live. But I see it as kind of a combination of marketplace plus platform. It's very marketplace-y in the sense that we are connecting these creators and we call them hosts with tour operators from around the globe. And

And so we're making that connection via our marketplace. But there's also a platform component to where we're giving the host tools and technology to be able to sell spots, manage bookings and build their group travel business. So it's a little bit of a mashup.

That's great. And then anything you want to share on sort of the scale that Trovatrip's operating at today, a number of folks who have booked a trip or anything like that? Yeah, so over 10,000 travelers have now booked a Trovatrip. And that number is accelerating, especially as the world starts to reopen to travel.

Super fun. Well, I thought the meat of the episode today, we could talk about some of the lessons that you picked up from bootstrapping the business originally. And maybe you can take us all the way back and kind of tell us the founding story. And then some of the initial, for lack of a better word, hardships you went through.

Yeah, absolutely. Lauren, you want to kick off the founding story? Yeah, sure. I want to start off by saying that we actually went to market just wanting to offer group travel for young professionals. And we didn't arrive at this marketplace plus platform solution right away. And so we went to market just wanting to offer group travel for young professionals.

We knew as young professionals that we loved travel and we wanted to travel in groups with like-minded people. And we didn't want a gap year experience that was fast-paced and staying in hostels. And we weren't quite looking for a 14-day Europe adventure because we couldn't take that much time off work. So we decided to...

think about creating experiences for millennials. So we sought out to offer really good group travel experience. And we learned really quickly that traveler acquisition without a lot of capital is really, really challenging. Even before we launched, it all started with one, I think, our passion,

Lauren and I had always talked about potentially starting a business together and had bounced ideas off and we're completely complimentary in the way that we work. I'm very much left-brained operations, analytics. She's very much right-brained sales, marketing, branding. And so it felt like a great fit. And it was actually on a group trip we were on with a couple of friends over in Europe where we started just spitballing on this idea.

how fun is this? What if we could create these experiences for everyone and make travel more accessible? Because we've been so lucky and blessed to be able to travel. How do we make it more available, more easy? And what we identified was there's all these group travel opportunities for 18 to 22 year olds. There's gap year. There's some brands that focus on that demographic. And there's a lot of opportunities for 50%.

plus demographic, but nothing really in between. So we started with that passion for the industry and then we saw the opportunity, but we didn't quite know how we were going to attack it. And so to Lauren's point, acquisition was very expensive. When we went to market in December, 2017,

We were selling direct to consumer and without proof of trips, without a brand, that is very expensive. And we were spending quite a bit on Facebook as well. And we had to learn quickly because we did not raise funding.

When you say expensive, is it because there's a lot of people bidding on those keywords or what is that? Yeah, so very competitive. We were competing with Expedia, a lot of these other brands that had a much larger war chest. And we also didn't necessarily have that proof of execution in the past as well.

When you were thinking about group travel at this point, how did you define that and think of it? Was it, I'm planning a trip with my friends. We all know each other. We have shared history. We're going to go have fun together. This is going to be a blast. Or more like the gap years or the 50 plus trips of like, I don't know any of these people. This is just a cool looking itinerary and I'm going to show up and make friends on the way. Yeah. So it was more on the latter was how do we

make these types of group travel experiences among friends more accessible to others who may not have that group to travel with or may not have the know-how to get out there. Yeah, and you reach a certain point in your life where...

It's difficult to align everyone getting PTO off at the same time. And some folks are starting families or different jobs with different experiences. So it's hard to get a group together. That was one of the most challenging things that we experienced at that age, trying to plan a trip. So there's a lot of people interested in traveling and solo travel is the best option for them.

And what better way to travel than in a group with like-minded folks and have everything taken care of so you don't have to worry about it because you're busy doing other things and don't have the time to plan. And so at this point, you didn't have the notion of creators being involved in the business at all, but you did have the two problems of one, it's hard to get distribution and very expensive. And two, you're looking for some way to find a group of like-minded people and get them together on something. Yeah. Yeah.

How did creators come into the equation? My background is in digital marketing. And I worked at ad networks and startups in the ad tech space and had a background selling affiliate marketing. So I thought if the paid ads on social and search are not doing the trick, why don't we start reaching out to travel bloggers who are already reaching the audience we want to get in front of?

I'd find them on Instagram, through Pinterest searches, Facebook, and reach out to them directly and say, Hey, would you be willing to promote our group trips in exchange for a CPA of, say, $100 per traveler? And I had...

Reached out to hundreds of content creators and heard no a thousand times, it felt like. And finally had a call with a content creator called the Blog Abroad. Her name was Glow. And this content creator was in the travel blogging space and offered...

trips to Bali every year, these bloggers retreats, and this content creator would plan everything, the accommodations, process payments using a solution like PayPal or something, and kind of piece together an experience.

and did a great job marketing and getting people signed up, but couldn't repeat this process in other destinations. So they asked if we would be willing to plan a trip to Portugal. And we said, absolutely, yes. We took care of everything. The content creator promoted, got every traveler signed up and taught workshops.

And we kind of figured out, aha, we've solved our traveler acquisition problem. And it made sense too, right? Like how cool is that to not only travel, but travel while learning about something you're passionate about from someone you look up to, right? And that was a huge aha moment for us.

Right. There's sort of that built in credibility and kinship where, you know, this person's been showing up in your social feed or in your podcast feed or whatever for all this time. And, you know, now not only is the experience special because like you're going someplace cool and doing something of interest to you, but like you're doing it with someone that already has your attention. Yeah.

It's pretty awesome. It really is like the hybrid of the two demographics on either side of like the gap year of like, it's not about learning. It's about like, we're going to go have fun with, you know, like, like minded people. And then you've got, you know, the, the 50 plus trips, which at least in my mind, I think are usually like university alumni, like a professor comes along and like,

Like what's the middle of those two things, the intersection, like content creators? Yeah. And from the consumer side, it's something that's taken off in other countries like Australia, like the UK and like Europe, but less so in the US. And so this was kind of that lightning rod to bring everyone together and create these incredible experiences for travelers.

Okay, so you went from the idea of like, let's see if we can pay 100 bucks to a creator to promote our trip, which creators are just bombarded with, you know, marketing opportunities all the time and having to be really selective about what they market to their audience to keep trust. How did you come to this idea that they're actually the host of the trip and they monetize the trip on a variable basis?

Yeah. You know, the number one reason why I heard no in the beginning was it wasn't that they didn't want to travel. They basically would tell me, you need to send me on the trip first. I need to make sure that this is a quality experience. If I'm going to put my brand behind it, I want to trust the product. And Nick and I were like, we

We don't even know if we're going to have a second trip at this rate. So that's not going to work. But it is really important to maintain brand integrity as a content creator. You have to be selective about the partnerships and what you're sponsoring and what you're promoting. And because this content creator had already done retreats, there was trust that she puts on really great workshops in person already by the audience. And she took a little bit of a risk working with us personally.

What we learned is that not all content creators are created equal. And we had to start understanding which ones would be interested in using our product but successful at promoting it and getting their audience to sign up. And that was a bit of a learning curve as we started developing

repeating this across a variety of categories, not just travel bloggers, because the interest was there. A lot of folks want to travel and get paid to do it, but not everyone can successfully sell a $2,000 plus trip and get enough people signed up for it to happen. And that's $2,000 per person in the group. That's correct. So then the question kind of becomes like,

How do you go about figuring out, like, how do you create the machinery to make it so that you're working with the right creators who you know can actually sell trips? A lot of testing and a lot of failing and learning quickly. But to really simplify what we look for, and there's a lot more that goes into it, we look at likability, relatability, and authenticity. And those are actually things you can measure.

So when you think about likability, what is your follower count? What is your engagement rate? Authenticity. Are people actually commenting and responding to the content that you put out there? Are you being vulnerable in showing who you are as a brand and really bringing people closer to your community that you're creating? We look at those KPIs and there's a lot of tools out there that make it really easy for someone to...

look at content creators and identify which ones are really standing out and doing a good job.

What are the major creator platforms that you look to source host from? Because I would imagine you can get very different data from YouTube versus Instagram versus podcasts versus, you know, other versus newsletters. Yeah, that's a really good question. And we're starting to learn that content creators in different what we call categories or industries sometimes perform stronger on different channels. So for example,

With TikTok being a newer social media platform, those content creators in the active movement and dance space can create really cool, quick videos of shuffle dancing on TikTok. And we find that our dance content creators do really well in the TikTok space.

Whereas a content creator who offers online workshops might be traditionally more blog-focused and like how to become a content creator and build your SEO strategy, you're going to find them on traditional social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. And you got to just start...

testing and following along the different platforms to really get a sense for which ones are attracting what type of talent in the creator space. You'll take and you are looking for hosts and creators on no matter what platform they're on, as long as they have an audience. Yeah, exactly. Lauren, when do you just know it's going to be a home run? Like when you look at a creator, like what are the five things that you're just like, they have these characteristics? Oh my God, this is going to just crush it for them.

I don't care how many followers you have. You could have 2,000 or a million. But what matters the most is what we're looking for as a host to go on a trip is that there's an actual personality behind your brand, someone who I actually want to either learn from or spend time with, or you've built a community so strong that I feel like I belong in that community. Something that we've recently started to have a lot of success in is Facebook groups.

We just launched a trip with a group that's, I think, less than 5,000 in that group. And it's called the Hobbit Hikers. And it's just this unique community of like-minded folks who are in the outdoors of all different shapes and sizes. And it's just a space where people feel like this is home for me. So I will go anywhere in the world where this community is traveling.

And so that's a total audience size of 5,000 to get to a trip of... It's 8 to 16 people each paying on the average of $2,000. Is that right? Yeah, so... That's a reasonable audience conversion rate. Yeah, so average trip size around 15. And we typically set the minimum for trips around 6 to 8 just because that's...

The point at which it makes sense for the host, for the operator, for us, and also creates a great experience for the traveler as well. Okay, you came to this notion of in order to get the distribution through creators, you

They can't just be an affiliate marketing thing. They have to go on the trips. They have to be the ones feeling like it's their trip. They're getting a big revenue share from being the people to host the trip. But you hadn't raised any money and you're in travel. And so there's like cash outlays to do. How did you think about like what's your cash flow cycle and what habits have you learned from being forced into that early on? Yeah, great, great question. We learned that very quickly again. Facebook,

advertising. If it's not a positive ROAS very quickly, you can get in trouble. But as we think about the economics of the business, we had to structure it in a way that was very cash cycle positive. So receive cash upfront, pay vendors after receiving full payment. Some industries, that's not possible, but we were able to structure it in a way that that was possible. And then also, as I mentioned, just limiting the downside risk of unsuccessful trips. It's that tilt model I mentioned where

You know, the trip doesn't happen until it reaches a certain number of travelers, which was really important for us. And we, of course, had to be very thoughtful about our investments with learning from Facebook advertising early on and making sure that we were measuring ROI on every investment we made because it was really scary early on. We weren't paying ourselves. Everything we had, we were investing back into the business. Lauren and I were living with our parents, which I feel so lucky that we had that opportunity to do early on because that...

enabled us to figure it out. And we were just getting really scrappy and learning to fail quickly. I mean, from the point that we launched in December of 2017 to that conversation with Glow was about a month. So we iterated that quickly in a month. And then a few weeks after that, we completely pivoted the business to focus on these creator hosted trips. So

A lot of iteration. I don't think I've ever done this on the show before, but I'll steal something that was part of my investment memo, which was, okay, when you're acquiring customers through Facebook ads, you are paying the moment they see the very first ad. And then there could be a long journey until they become a customer of yours. That could be a year, two years, five years on any given business. And in your business,

The moment that a traveler is sort of acquired into, into Trova trip from a creator, they're paying you, but you don't pay the creator until close to the trip. So you actually, rather than spending your marketing dollars way at the top of the sort of funnel before someone actually becomes a customer, the first interaction you ever have with a traveler is them paying you. And then after that, you sort of pay out your suppliers. Yeah.

That's correct. So they pay 25% down payment upfront, which is fully refundable until the trip is on and it's confirmed and hey, this is going to happen. We're guaranteeing this experience. And then 60 days pre-trip, they will pay the remaining 75% balance. And that's when we pay out the host and the operator for all those that are actually going on the trip.

I just want to call out that this is a unique model in the group travel space. And neither Nick, Brandon, or I, both founders, all three of us, come from a background in travel. We're mostly a background in tech. And in the group travel space, it's really typical for a tour operator to collect a down payment that is refundable from their traveler's

And it's not until about 30 or 60 days before the trip starts that that down payment turns to non-refundable. Pre-pandemic, most operators didn't get paid the full balance until the trip was complete. So we approached this in a totally brand new way.

It's funny. It's like, it would be nice to have known something about the industry, but not knowing any better. You also sort of invented a better business model. Yeah. We have no travel industry experience other than going on some incredible trips.

Which not having experience did hurt us in some ways, especially early on not having anyone with a background in group travel. All right. Well, I got to dive at that then. How'd that hurt you? You know, so we started partnering with tour operators mid-2018 where that's where we really started building the marketplace for supply and working with these incredible tour operators. And that was a steep learning curve to learn how to work with them, learn how to find them, learn how to vet them as well. And that's

that would have been nice to have a little bit of travel industry experience, but we, we quickly shored that up and hired someone to the team that did have that traditional experience. So I think it worked out well because we,

Came in fresh with no ideas on how to structure the payment cycles and the economics and did it in a way that we thought made sense. And then we brought in someone with the travel industry experience to help us build out the supply side of things for scale. Who does the itinerary planning? Is it the creator? Is it a tour operator? Is it them working together in tandem? Yeah.

We have a trip experience team and that team is dedicated to onboarding certified tour operators and putting them through a vetting and inspection process, making sure that they have a CMS in place, which prior to being in the space didn't know what that meant, crisis management system. So obviously we had a lot to learn, making sure they have the right insurance and they check off all the boxes. And once we go through that process and clear them to start listing trips in our marketplace, we're

We have trip designers who work really closely with these operators to design experiences and itineraries that are repeatable across a wide range of topic experts. So if you're a photographer in the outdoor space, you can find an itinerary that matches what you're looking for, or you're an author who wants to offer writer's workshops or

or your body positivity, empowerment, lifestyle content creator, you just wanna go travel and do it in a safe way. So that's our process in finding operators and then getting really good itineraries and experience in the platform. And then the operators, they're the ones who take care of everything on the ground.

So accommodations, transportations, meals, activities, even provide a certified guide throughout so that the host can just show up however they want to show up, whether it's offering workshops or just hanging out with their group. And they don't have to worry about anything else.

This is something that took me a long time to understand. Like, TrovaTrip employees do not go on the trips. That makes you very different than the very human-intensive versions of this business in the past. This sort of marketplace approach where you go and you find that amazing travel opportunity

operator in Indonesia who runs the company and has the insurance. And once you get their itineraries onboarded, what does that sort of library of itineraries look like at this point? And is it pretty off the shelf to just use them for other creators? Yeah, good question. So we do send an employee to do a site inspection visit before we onboard an operator. But that's

that will be the only time we go to visit the operator and we'll do that on an annual cycle as makes sense. But as it relates to itinerary, so it depends on the category, right? So we could have our Bali operator that builds a yoga specific itinerary that has slots for workshops. So many different yoga teachers have the opportunity to use that itinerary and personalize it and build in their own workshops. So now the supply is very, um,

scalable and can be reused, but it's also a very personal experience for the host as well as the traveler. Yeah. We recently just launched a trip to Colombia that is LGBTQ plus focused, and it was designed to cater to that audience. And so some of the experiences are a little bit more niche, but we're really excited to continue to add more because it's really easy for us. All we have to do is find really good operators that know what they're doing and have been doing this for decades. Yeah.

I think about everything through the acquired lens, but like even something fairly niche like what you just described in Columbia, that's still like a very large niche. Like I'm imagining if we did an acquired trip someday, which would be awesome, we should totally do that. Like,

We are going to be going to places that literally nobody else is going to ever want to go to, you know, like random like abandoned warehouses like in the South Bay of, you know, the San Francisco Bay Area. Like that's not what plenty of other categories of content create. Like yoga content creators are all going to basically want to go to the same kinds of places and there'll be itineraries can be reused.

It's interesting that you bring that up. We do invite all of our content creators who've never offered group trips before to access a tool for gathering audience feedback before they start planning a trip in the form of a survey. And they put this survey in front of their audience, wherever that audience lives on TikTok, on YouTube, on Facebook. And they ask them and invite them to have a seat at the table and designing a trip. And in that survey, we collect information on

on that audience and where they want to go. And we also include destinations that we currently don't offer. So we use that data to inform our expansion strategy and make sure that we're designing trips that the market wants to experience. How many people have taken that survey at this point? I think about 300,000. That number always floors me because the vast majority of these people have never gone on a Trova trip, but you now have a relationship with them. And

they've actually helped shape... It's like you were sort of feeling around in the dark before, but now you have 300,000 data points of where there actually is a market to travel to and what to do on those trips. Yep, that's exactly right. That's how we approach expansion from a supply perspective, from a destination perspective, from a category perspective,

perspective as well as we try to be very data driven and how we expand. And again, I think that comes from the early stages of bootstrapping where, you know, we couldn't afford to make mistakes. So we had to get smart on how we could leverage data to make decisions. Have there been any surprisingly deep wells in terms of topic area or place to travel where you were like, ah, we sort of did this as an experiment and didn't think it would work, but like actually has been very popular? Yeah.

At one point, we thought Greenland would be a hit. And that one did not translate as well. And I'm sure it'll trend again here soon. So we definitely made some mistakes along the way. I actually think back to earlier in the pandemic when travel stopped and nobody wanted to talk about it. And that's when we started picking up the phone and calling our content creators who were using our platform and just doing wellness checks and asking how they were doing. And we quickly learned that they weren't doing great.

But they did want to travel when it was safe to travel again. So we started doing these host-only events, a safe space for content creators to talk about difficult topics like not being able to monetize because advertising dollars were disappearing left and right. And it was in those conversations that we took feedback from our customers, the host, and asked them where they wanted to go. And we did some testing and started offering really bucket list destinations. Some of them landed, some of them didn't, like Greenland. We didn't use the data for all of them. And so we did some testing there that was really interesting. But

A lot of those bucket list destinations helped us get through the pandemic because they were so noteworthy that people were willing to book it even though we were quarantining, thinking about this is something I want to check off my bucket list when it's safe to travel. So people were booking for like, this trip will happen at a future date when it's safe to travel. But people were booking. That's awesome. And then you were getting some of that cash conversion happening even while everybody was at home.

Correct. And the other piece too is until the pandemic, we only ran international trips. And so once the pandemic took hold, we

we realized how important it was to build domestic supply and build itineraries in the US because about 80 to 85% of our hosts and their audiences and travelers are from the US to enable them to travel during the pandemic as well. Okay, so it's not all sunshine and butterflies, like bootstrapping. I mean, it teaches you a lot of lessons. Some are good and some are bad. And so now that the business is really working, what have you found yourself having to...

sort of shake off and what instincts do you have to fight on a daily basis? Yeah, great question. So our team is about 50 now. And while many of those bootstrapping habits hold, we have to be much more strategic around our decision making for the long term business growth, and perhaps less focused on short term cash flows in some senses so that we can make the right long term decision. So for example, we were

pretty sales heavy prior to our seed round last year, because we had to be scrappy, and we had to invest heavily in our revenue generating team. But with the investment, we've been able to round out the organization and build a really strong organizational foundation that will enable us to scale, which would have been very difficult without that investment.

And then the other piece too, as we're moving into expansion into new markets, these investments markets can take some time to grow and evolve. So need to be a bit more patient. And again, very, very focused on how to get there successfully versus before, you know, it's very quick pivots and iterations. So just have to be a bit more thoughtful in general.

I just think back to our early days where we were living at home with our parents and we went unpaid for a year and a half. And we hired our first full-time employee and paid that full-time employee more than we were paying ourselves. We were always so scrappy about...

where can we save money and just do it ourselves, that that's something I'm having to unlearn now that we actually have some money in the bank. That's been challenging for me. So for example, we're thinking about doing PR and I literally choke every time I get a quote. It's like $15,000 a month. And I'm like, well, can I just build my top 10 list and start reaching out to them? And I need to learn how to let go a little bit and start spending money. And that's been hard. Yeah.

A refrain that always occurs to me is with pre-product market fit startups, the only reason that the company is alive is because of you. You are like willing something in your own image into existence. And post-product market fit, the number one reason the company is not going to survive is because of you, because you refuse to give stuff up.

And I have to imagine that making that like complete 180 in your psyche for everything you do throughout the day has to be tough. Yeah. I mean, it's our baby and we built it and handing some of those different pieces off from a delegation perspective can sometimes be hard, but is super critical. Yeah.

Yeah, as a first-time founder, and I was an individual contributor my whole career working in sales, suddenly I have a team of 15 employees, and I need to learn how to take a step back and start hiring, you know, folks in the middle to manage, and it's been a whole –

Whole new ballpark, learning curve, and great experience. But there's a lot to adapt to. I bet. Well, maybe going in a little bit of a different direction, I think in VC land, we heard a ton of noise about the creator economy four years ago until about a year ago. It seems like Web3 has usurped it in some ways, and there's a lot of...

stuff in Web3. So a lot of the creator diehard investors have sort of turned their attention to creators in Web3. And I'm curious, like,

We can read all the think pieces we want from people who are operating at a 30,000 foot view. But as founders on the ground who are working with, you know, hundreds of creators day in and day out, how have you noticed trends in the creator economy shift over the last couple of years? A great question. And actually, Signal Fire wrote a great article on the evolution of the creator economy, which aligns with a lot of our thoughts. You know, first, there

There were the creator platforms themselves, right? That allowed creators to build their audiences, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, you name it. Then creators started looking to monetize and the obvious place was partnering with brands and businesses to do so, which has worked. It's been successful and we've seen many marketplaces and platforms built in this space, but

If you promote too often, it can come off inauthentic and start to alienate your audience. So you have to be careful there. And where I think we're moving is into phase three, and it's already started. But this is where creators establish themselves as businesses and take full control of their brand and their income. And Trova Trip is a platform that enables them to do so because they get to pick how much they earn. It's their group travel business, and they get to grow it and own it.

So what did the economics look like for a creator working with y'all? Yeah, so average trip, they earn about $6,000. But we've seen hosts earn upwards of 20 or 30,000. Again, it's completely up to them. They know their audience. And for those that are offering these

once in a lifetime and incredible workshops, they're able to charge a premium. And they go on the trip too, right? And they go on the trip, yes. Being sort of on the other other side, it's funny, at first I'm speaking with my venture capitalist hat on and now I'll speak with my creator hat on. David and I have definitely noticed...

that throughout the life of Acquired, there's more and more tools for creators such that you can make your business more bespoke and tailored. I think when we were first starting out, David, it kind of felt like if you're making a podcast, you're doing a thing. If you're becoming a YouTuber, you're doing a thing. And now it kind of feels like you get to decide a lot more what tools you use and how that tailors to the uniqueness of your audience. Yeah.

and you can use platforms in different ways. Like we have just started a TikTok. It's an experiment. It's not clear to me that we'll keep doing the TikTok, but it's...

it's been interesting to test and see, okay, in a business that we know well, we understand our funnel, we understand our audience's need, we understand their demographics from doing extensive surveying. How does each respective content distribution network, content format type, and then engagement model, call it Slack or however else we engage with audiences, how can each of those sort of fit into the world of Acquired rather than how can Acquired fit into being a one platform business?

piece of content. Yep. Yep. You know, it's funny when you're doing a thing, you're so deep in it. It's kind of like you guys are saying about if you had been in the travel industry, well, you would have done things in the travel industry the way they were done and you weren't. So you got to think differently. Having been doing a choir for so long, I just naturally in my mind, like equated

being a content creator with being an entrepreneur. It's a spectrum. Like some people who are content creators are full entrepreneurs like, you know, Ben and I are, you know, Paki or Mario or some people are not running businesses at all.

And then lots of people are in between. And that means lots of different things. And so it's cool. Like, you know, Trova Trip, things like Palette with job boards. There are all these dials you can turn now to like increase your level of entrepreneurship or decrease your level of entrepreneurship. And that's so cool for you guys to be able to offer that. Like you may not monetize any other way besides Trova Trip as a creator, or you may monetize 16 different ways of which Trova Trip is one.

Yeah, it's been really interesting watching the host journey or the content creator journey of some of the folks who use our platform to monetize. I've witnessed content creators quit their full-time job and lean into becoming a 100% digital nomad. And it's wild. It's a journey. It's stressful. And I really respect content creators. They are just like entrepreneurs. They're the founder of their own brand and business. And it's really hard to make it successful.

We had a host who prior to the pandemic was in the fitness space and that was her brand. It was all around nutrition and weight training. She has an online nutrition business and she actually had a brick and mortar fitness studio. And she sold her fitness studio right before the pandemic hit, really lucky timing wise. But throughout the pandemic, she decided to pay

pivot her brand completely and focus on becoming this outdoors expert. She's passionate about climbing and skiing. And so she was able to run with that, become a mountaineering guide, and then offer five plus trips a year through the TrovaTrip platform for her community to go climb in Patagonia with her hike in New Zealand. And it's been really fun to see how our brand has helped these content creators take their brand to the next level. We're in the business of helping others grow their business.

Right.

Her passion lied in the outdoors and she was no longer passionate about, you know, weight training. So she was able to make that change and get folks on board. And it is interesting because I know that on some of her more intensive trips where you're training to do weightlifting.

10 plus miles of hiking in a day. She actually offers as a value add some of her training, nutrition and exercise workshops for free to some of those folks. And I know that oftentimes on our trips, a mix of her travelers are folks who came from her other businesses. So I know she's managed to maintain some of them.

This is something David and I thought a lot about as we started going more down the Web3 rabbit hole. We were like, uh-oh, what anti-crypto, diehard acquired fans are we going to alienate by doing this? And I feel like we've struck a nice balance. But it's funny how you do start thinking about once you become known for a thing, do you have to worry about chasing something that...

you know, is not your thing. You have to follow your passion or else you won't be able to keep it up. I've seen content creators quit entirely because they're no longer passionate about what they do. And there are a lot of hardships and pain points that content creators face on a daily. They have this massive platform. They have massive reach. There are sometimes Reddit forums dedicated to

trolling that content creator and bringing them down and commenting on everything they say, do, how they present themselves. And that takes a toll on your mental health when you're constantly reading through comments that are really hurtful or DMs. And so you have to make sure you love what you're doing, just like an entrepreneur starting a business or else you cannot sustain it because that's a lot of noise that you have to silence in order to keep it up.

Yeah, I know a handful of folks that were sub stack newsletter writers after quitting their job and now have jobs again. The grass is not always greener. It's the entrepreneurship scale. Like, you know, some people are comfortable with that. They want to be full on. You know, I want all the risk. I want all the upside. Some people want the opposite. And I think what's cool is that like a lot of people are somewhere in between those two things. Trevor Tripp is a great way to help with that. When did the funding round happen in 2020?

20 or 2021? We actually did a pre-seed in 2020, which was interesting timing. And this is what, three years after you had started the business? Yeah. Going into 2020, everything's hitting, everything's great. When bookings overnight went to zero.

I feel honestly blessed and lucky from a business perspective in terms of timing, because we were still pretty small and nimble. I think we were a team of about six or seven and we had raised some funds. And I'll never forget this one moment where I had a call scheduled with a VC who shall not be named. And I was talking to him and it had been scheduled before the pandemic started, but the call was in late March. And what he said is,

I was like, do you have any advice? And he said, well, you had a great run. It might be time to close up shop. And we were, we were in this, you know, woe is us. We're in travel. This, this is terrible. This is so painful, but that was the moment. And I remember I told Lauren about that. Nothing is more motivating than someone telling you you can't do something. So that was when we really started to react and, and iterate. And yeah,

Yeah. So that was, that was interesting. One of my favorite lines is that, you know, there's two ways to make sure that something happens in this world. One is to do it yourself. Two is to tell an entrepreneur they can't do it. Yeah. And then May 2020, believe it or not, was two and a half X what our best month ever was from a booking perspective.

Thanks to a lot of those shifts with the product roadmap, getting our hosts together, content strategies and whatnot. And so we went back to market and we basically got two responses from angels and VCs. It was either you're insane. There's no way travel. Are you kidding me? Or wow, you guys are growing through a pandemic. This looks interesting. Let's do it.

We closed our pre-seed in July of 2020. And then our seed round, we closed in June 2021, which was led by Pioneer Square Labs. And, you know, we're now coming up on a year since then. How's it going? Obviously, you and Ben don't hate each other yet. Whoa, don't throw that yet in there. Yeah, yeah, no.

Oh, it's going great. I mean, I think having been on the board and especially his perspective as it relates to Acquired and just understanding the landscape has been so incredible and critical to our growth. And as I mentioned previously, it's really about rounding out the organization and preparing for more scale while laying the seeds for a lot more growth as we roll out of COVID, hopefully, and the pandemic.

And now that the world is reopening again, it's a lot about execution this year. So we'll run over 300 trips with over 4,500 travelers. And we're laser focused on ensuring an incredible experience for our travelers, for our hosts, and for our operators. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of shaking off the cobwebs as the world turns back on and we start traveling the world again.

I know you finally, Brandon, who leads the tech organization, after, what, four and a half years now, you have the ability for all your different systems to be self-serve and talk to each other. So the traveler portal where people can book trips, the operator portal where you work with the operators, and then the host side of everything. And it's all sort of one system now. What is that...

unlock for you that you previously weren't able to do as a business? And how does it help you scale? That's a great question. And we always joke that two-sided marketplaces are easy. Airbnb, you have the homeowners and the renters, right? But we actually have three entities because we have the host operator and the traveler. So we've been investing to get them to a place where they are fully self-service. And because of that, until recently, the platform has only been invite-only. Right.

So what this enables us to do as the platform is now self-service across these entities is it brings our costs way down to launch a trip, which enables us to open up the platform to more topic experts and creators to start building their own group travel business. So that's really important for us, too, as we think about our mission, which is to make travel safer and more accessible to all.

is opening up this platform so that it enables anyone to really build their own group travel business successfully. And when you say, you know, bring down the cost, it basically means you can shift from direct outbound sales that's, you know, butts in seats to like an actual marketing model, right? That's exactly right.

Also, all the manual work that goes on behind the scenes to make a trip successful, we're reducing a lot of that through the technology by making it possible for someone to self-onboard and request a trip and have that directly go to the operator. Operator receives it, sends it back with here's what it costs to operate. Now you priced it. A lot of that stuff was manual before. And so we just can hit a higher volume of trips as well. So that's going to be a great opportunity.

Great future. Early on, we were very much powered by Google Sheets and Zapier to connect all the different platforms. And it was great because it allowed us to find product market fit without the burden of having to do a lot of releases with the platform. But then obviously the flip side is it's a little more challenging to scale. So now that we have the platform built and are very much platform powered, it's much more scalable from a demand side of things. When you talk about acquisition and reintegration,

been reference going from sales driven into you know incorporating marketing too that's of acquiring creator hosts right and

Correct. How do you do that? Because you have such a diverse array of creators across different niches and categories. Where do you find them? How do you get in front of them? That's a great question. And because every category is different, and we try to be focused on how we expand into categories because it requires supply as well to be successful. And so we approach it from category to category. First, we start by doing direct

outreach and working with these creators within a category. And what that's doing also is it gives us the data to build the right supply and build the right itineraries. And then when we reach a critical mass, we can then look at that data. And then we have the KPIs that tell us what makes a successful host within that category, which enables us to turn on marketing. Because you're right, every category is very different. And what KPIs determine success.

It's interesting to apply like a business model concept to what self-serve enables. You know, you've got this big risk spectrum of how likely it is that a creator is a home run for being able to sell out a trip and have a great experience. And, you know, you have...

Taylor Swift on one end of the spectrum where you are 100% sure if she markets a trip, it will fill up and it'll be a great trip and it'll be profitable and all these things. And then, you know, you've got your local disc golf coach who has eight followers, but maybe all eight of them are like

totally obsessed because they play disc golf eight times a week together. And I bring up disc golf because I know that's a category that works for you guys, which I always thought was funny as a former disc golf enthusiast. And so what this sort of enables you to do is just unlock more of that risk spectrum where you can drive that traffic there and you don't have to work extensively with them to understand, okay, should we, you know, do the dance together and launch this trip? You can kind of just say, I don't know, try it, launch a trip. It's

completely risk-free for us. And if you sell enough seats, then it'll go live and then you get to take the trip. I always just think about that spectrum. Yeah. And I think that the survey tool that we utilize and give to our hosts to ask their audience, would you be interested in traveling with them? It's not just a tool for us for expansion. It's a tool for them to see, do I have enough high intent travelers who'd actually spend money to go travel with me? And what is their budget? And

We can quickly look at that data, compare it against all the other data that we've collected and tell them, hey, you could do one to two trips a year or actually looks like you could do a higher volume. Let's get to five. And here are the top destinations. Here's how we recommend you price it. So it's a bit more sophisticated and we can help support them as they start testing this out because most of our content creators have never offered group travel before.

It's interesting too, because the host and the creator, what they think their audience wants is very different than what their audience wants. So it's interesting thinking about one of our content creators who surveyed her audience years ago. She was a desert dweller at the time, and most of her content was sunshine and warm and outside. And so she actually used the survey and

gathered enough data. And once we reviewed that data, she was fascinated to learn that our audience's number one destination was Patagonia. And I'll never forget her saying and laughing, my audience has betrayed me because she did not want to go to Patagonia. And luckily, we didn't force her because she gets to choose where she wants to go. You know, she learned something new that she didn't know previously about our audience. And so it was really helpful for her to understand how to effectively monetize. Yeah.

Okay, so one thing I like to ask folks, especially when I have a vested interest in the success and I don't want to like come off as pure softballs, every business has trade-offs and you have a lot of things going for you. You've got this, you know,

great cash cycle that you've created based on having to learn, you know, and be really frugal at the beginning. You have an internet travel business where you pay zero dollars to acquire travelers. You have crazy distribution through your hosts. But like, what sucks about the business? What's really hard? And like, what will continue to be hard and

you know, if you could wave your magic wand and make this part of the business way easier or make it go away, what is that in your company? So something that...

I always think about as a marketplace, how do we ensure safety? How do we ensure that everyone has good intention and that we have really strong community guidelines in place so that we're not attracting people with bad intentions? And I want to make sure that we're doing it right because our mission is to make travel safer and more accessible. Yeah, it's funny. Like you mentioned earlier that some of these creators have Reddit, subreddits dedicated to hating on them. What's to stop?

Yeah, that's something we've thought about at length. And it's something that came up in the very early days. What if someone signs up and I don't feel comfortable? And that's why we created a process and built it into the platform so that when a host makes a call,

promotes and travelers sign up in the host portal. They can see exactly who signed up. They have information. We even collect Instagram handles. So there's a face behind it so that they can reference that individual. And if they feel unsafe for some reason, they have the ability to reject a traveler because safety is our number one priority. And that's really important that they have the ability to control who goes on the trip.

Nick, any opinions from your side on the sort of trade-offs, the things that are uniquely hard or challenging about the business? There's a lot of moving pieces to the business. And I think because we're providing a full stack experience, this isn't just software. It's also in real life. We need to make sure that we're vetting and onboarding the best operators in the world. We need to think about...

How do we onboard and support our hosts? We need to provide customer service and support for our travelers. And we need to have a great technology solution. So all of those require a lot of time, love, and care. And there's a lot of moving pieces. And it's taken us a while to figure out how to get them all working in tandem together. But I think as we continue to scale, it's something we'll have to continue to focus on.

And to quote a Hamilton helmerism, which I think will be our most recent episode before this one, you know, technology at the end of the day just brings down transaction costs. And in any platform where any transaction is made, you know, by building more and more technology, if you really understand the nature of the transactions that are being made, you can just...

sort of exponentially decrease the cost of that transaction. And whether the transaction is literally a card swipe or it's facilitating two parties to make sure that there's trust and safety involved in between them, you know, I think...

You can kind of keep chipping away at that little by little by building more and more of the right things for people. Yeah. And that's also what makes us very defensible. We joke about, you know, if we were to ship our software off to our nearest competitors, it still would be very hard because that's not the business. The business is building the networks and the processes and creating these incredible full stack experiences, which takes a lot of time and focus to do.

All right. Well, as we wind to a close here, one sort of final broad question is what's next?

Yeah. So we've been growing a lot over the last few years. We actually were about 3X in bookings in 2020 and accelerated in 2021, just under 4X. So we now have over 600 bookable trips. And I believe we have itineraries in 43 different countries across the globe. So continue to scale that side of the business, ensure that we're providing an incredible experience.

And we're starting to explore some new markets as well. So we've just started working with a few different brands with Trova Trip for Business. I'm not going to say too much, but we are very much in grow and scale mode. Well, that's great. Nick, Lauren, thank you so much for coming on today. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you so much for having us. Thank you.

See you in the next board meeting. See you in the next board meeting. That's an even better sign off than see you next time.

Listeners, thanks so much. And we'll see you next time. See you in the next board meeting. Ben, when are we going to have an acquired board meeting? Does acquired have a board? I think every day is an acquired board meeting. No. That's a good question. Maybe we need one. Do we need titles? We're going to put applications for acquired board members in the link to the show notes. So that way when you and I are fighting too much, someone's in there to help us resolve conflict. Which happens literally 0% of the time. All right, for real listeners, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.