Travellr.com was launched in May 2009 by Ian Cumming and Scott Woodhouse. The site lets you ask questions about anywhere in the world, and connects you with a world-wide community of travellers to help people find the best local knowledge possible. I asked Ian about how Travellr has progressed since its launch.
What motivated you to set up Travellr?
We really wanted to solve a really common travel problem – if you don’t know a local, who can you ask? What if you could just ask your own travel questions, and get answers from fellow travellers and locals?
Some of the best experiences I’ve had travelling have been from asking locals and discovering cool and interesting places that are off the beaten path. Through local knowledge I’ve found underground markets in Bangkok, discovered hidden rooftop bars in New York, been snow drift racing in Niseko in Japan, explored remote Buddhist caves in Laos, and swam with reef sharks on an island in Thailand – none of which are in any guide books!
How long did it take you to get from initial idea to launch?
We developed a very early prototype of Travellr in January 2008, then raised some private investment and put our team together to develop Travellr’s architecture and features. We launched an invite-only private beta in February 2009, and continued to improve and release features to a small beta community. In May we launched Travellr at CeBIT Webciety in Sydney, Australia.
How did you perceive the initial reactions to the website when you launched?
We had a great opportunity at CeBIT to see people interact and ask questions on Travellr at our booth. You can learn a great deal about how people understand and use your site from first-hand observation. I think people understood and appreciated our simplicity and focus on only providing travel answers. Some people asked some really hard questions (such as, where to buy a 2nd hand 4wd in Kenya), and the real reward for us was seeing Travellr answer people’s questions!
What would you identify as the greatest challenges so far, and were these challenges you expected?
I feel that the biggest challenge to any online startup is distribution. The larger we can grow our network the bigger we can build Travellr’s collective knowledge, and provide more answers to questions. Our real challenge is how to grow our network and keep its quality, that is – people who love to travel and share their experiences and local-knowledge.
If you launched today, is there anything you would do differently?
It’s hard to say, since launching a site requires so much effort and attention that you can’t do everything you would like. I think finding a partner to launch with would have helped build greater distribution and awareness of our service.
Which other travel social networks do you like?
I’m a fan of SpottedByLocals (spottedbylocals.com), World Nomads (journals.worldnomads.com), Aardvark (vark.com) and Mobissimo (mobissimo.com). They all provide different kinds of social services for travelers, but they are sites that I like and are helpful for travelers.
What is your target for members?
Our target is that people get timely and relevant answers to their questions. We want to reach 95% of questions being answered within 10 minutes of being asked. We’re currently close to 95% questions answered, but need to grow our community to get closer to 10 minutes response time.
Have you found it harder or easier than expected to get new members?
We are continually observing and learning about our community. Travellr is transitioning from a beta-community to a public community, so there’s a different kinds of members. In our private-beta, we had early adopters who are great at providing feedback and support. Now that we’re public, we need to reach a broader community of travelers and demonstrate how Travellr can help them.
How would you like to see Travellr developing in the future?
We are going to continue to enhance our recommendation engine so we can improve the quality and relevance of our question suggestions. We are also planning to open up our API so other travel sites can syndicate our content and connect into our answers service. I think it will be exciting to see other great ideas and mashups people might come up with on top of the Travellr API.
You can follow Ian on Twitter at twitter.com/aussie_ian
