Pete Sullivan is the 27 year old co-founder and CEO of social travel network Tripl. Pete, originally of Brooklyn, New York, created Tripl while he was an MBA student in Sweden. He sat down and talked to Startup Harbor about where Tripl’s been, where it is now, and where it’s off to next. You can follow Pete on Twitter at @pjsullivan3. If you visit New York City someday soon, you might even be able to connect with him on some common interests.
Pete – talk about how Tripl came to be.
A few years ago I was working in finance in San Fran and at night I was trying to get involved in the tech scene. I coded when I was younger, learned graphic design by myself, and was trying to do a startup at night in the secondary ticket market, like a ticket exchange. I was going to a lot of concerts and sporting events at the time and it was something I was really passionate about. I couldn’t dedicate 100% of my time to it, and I knew I needed to if I wanted it to succeed. I found this opportunity to go to Sweden for a free MBA and it was ending soon so I jumped on. In the back of my head I knew it would give me the time I needed to do build something. By coincidence, when I made that decision I came across an issue that needed fixing. Before I left for Sweden, I stopped in Miami. I tried to find people I could connect with, through Twitter or whatever communities, but I couldn’t pull the resources I needed. At the same time, I took a look at what was going on with Facebook’s API. Back in 2009 there was a change where you could cache data, when before you had to delete it after 24 hours. That made it really difficult to build any cool applications and I said there had to be a cool opportunity here.
So I flew over to Stockholm and registered a URL called VacationRelation. It sounded good, it rhymed, but it turned out to be a nightmare. It was a 14 character domain and had bad overall branding but we stuck with it. I also met my Swedish cofounder through it. After that kind of fizzled, we discovered we had to build an application that people can engage with all year long, not just when they travel. That May we put together a round with Swiss and New York angel investors and knew we had to find a really tight internal team. It sucked. We recruited for about 3 months prior to that round just selling the dream to our new hires that we would be closing a new round. At the same time, it was like we didn’t close it, we didn’t close it. Finally we got it done to our huge relief. We got a good team on board and started building what’s now Tripl at the end of May and let private betas in during September or October. This December we launched the public beta and right now we’re basically heads down in a major iteration. We’re taking everything we’ve learned from all the analytics and saying, our thesis was this then and now our thesis is about how do we get conversations forming around these topics? And the whole jist of what we’re trying to do is connect people around travel. If you take all these dots that are moving around the world every day and dots that are staying still, all these connections are being missed. As we become more of a global society, technology will help us capture them.
What’s an example where something went wrong?
Back to Vacation Relation actually. We were launching it in November 2010 and came to New York. I tried doing cold call walk-ins on all these VC offices and had basically a 0% success rate. It’s unrelated, but now fast-forward a year, having built out Tripl’s social proof connections, we were sitting down having meetings with most of those guys. But back then, instead of raising money we built a prototype demo. No backend database, it was a total façade. We built a video around and it and sent it to a big travel conference called PhoCusWright. Turns out we got in and were like “Oh fuck! Now I have to build this out!” We scrambled for money and got our first investment from a professional poker player, a guy younger than me. He got all this office space filled with other poker players he was training and some other startups he invested in. It sort of evolved into an incubator. When we approached him we literally only had drawings of what we wanted to do. He supported us when we had nothing, but then we got some support from the Swedish government, launched the product, and almost instantly knew where we screwed up. Even though there were all these people traveling all the time, and you could add on Facebook where and when you’re going and through our product see if anyone else was heading there too, it required way too much critical mass. First, we had all these filter features but they only work when you have a shit ton of people. Next, people don’t travel all that often. People ended up putting in dummy data to try the application that wasn’t relevant. These people would get in the system for the week and then they were gone and you’d never see again. At the end, it was good though. Our lessons led us to Tripl though.
What are upcoming plans and changes we can expect from Tripl?
Today we’re actually finding out if we made it into The Next Web conference in April and if we do we’ll make a few announcements about a new funding round (ed. note: they got in). We’re looking to do a summer accelerator program to get our biz dev up, a new web app design. For the new design, when you view it on your phone everything adjusts even if you don’t have the app to make it feel like it app. It’s not a mobile site; it just adjusts to your product. We know a lot of content sites that do this but we don’t know any web apps that have actually done it. We’ve got an iPhone app targeted for the beginning of May, and we’re releasing our first social travel aide. We have around three million people indexed in the database so far, and that data’s starting to become valuable. We’re finding over ten thousand trips per week based on check-ins, so even if they’re not saying their going on trips, we’re able to surface them. This summer is all about getting the distribution set up and working with 3rd parties and travel sites.
What’s the iPhone app going to look like?
We’ve been looking at statistics and turns out people don’t use mobile web on their phone when they travel abroad. However, people are using their phones as their primary source of internet at the hotel. So how can we utilize that? By caching things for use later on. A friend told you to go somewhere, you can cache it on your phone locally so when you’re not on wifi you can use it. The real premise for the iPhone app is you should fire it up every day. Even when you don’t have a trip planned there’s a stream of people coming to your city. We use social context and interests so you could set up an alert for any interest of yours, like fintech maybe. Whenever someone comes into New York with that interest, you’re alerted and can say hey, I’d love to talk to you. We also track where your friends check in, on Facebook status updates or anything from Instagram or Foursquare that has geo data. So, in practice, your friend from New York takes a picture from London last night. So ok, he’s there, you know 10 people in London, but he doesn’t have connections there. Tripl helps you put them together. So it has a human element of viral growth, you can connect two people who’ve never used the service
What’s the overall goal or thesis you guys are working with?
No travel company has been able to get people think about traveling 365 days a year. If your app inspires people to be constantly engaged, there’s a big opportunity to sell products organically. So your friend logs into Tripl and adds a trip to Cancun. We know the dates he’s going, we know where your location is. We can quickly ping a price for you to go on the same dates as him at his hotel and say your friends going to Cancun, want to go? Right now we’re trying to partner up with an airline via API and we’re checking out other interesting things we can do it with. You and your friend want to meet up at a location? What’s the cheapest place for you to meet up with that would have a bunch of girls? We’ll take into account demographics, pricing, social context, like where do you have the most common friends that’s cheapest to fly. The possibilities are endless. Our actual revenue model is built around engaging different travel partners like airlines, hotels, activities, etc. Activities are also huge. It’s not about daily deals. So if you’re going to Berlin and three days before your trip, you can check out things other people are up to. We know your demographics, and you’re going with your girlfriend, and we say there are four other couples from the US who have done a backpacking excursion with the idea that tour operators and online travel agencies sell that package deal. We want to be an agnostic hub. We don’t care where the traffic comes from, we provide an opportunity for them to retarget and resell products. The big vision is you book a hotel on Expedia, Expedia passes the information to us. Without your knowledge, a friend or a friend of your friend is booking the same trip on Priceline. Normally these communities don’t talk, but if we’re an agnostic hub we can provide that connection. We can hopefully take those users and provide them suggestions that redirect them to the product providers. We’ll add a product to your trip that’s socially targeted to you. That’s the big vision but it’ll take a while to get there.
Tripl is based out of Sweden but you’re moving operations to New York. Has that presented any problems?
We started it just as masters students on picnic benches and it evolved into something serious. We should have said “No, let’s not start it in Sweden, it’s a major mistake.” The market there isn’t mature yet for tech companies. You have really good developers and designers, but the capital market, legal structure and communities aren’t strong. For one, having to recruit is really hard there. It’s really expensive compared to even New York and it’s really hard to get housing. Knowing that we wanted to be here the whole time, we should have just set up here. We’ve had to restructure with a parent company here and a wholly owned subsidiary there. We literally have to do taxes in Swedish and I don’t even know Swedish. We’re in the process of moving everyone here and winding down the Swedish entity. Who knows though, we have to see if it becomes an advantage or not.
Ben Elowitz (co-founder/CEO of Wetpaint, former co-founder of Blue Nile) recently wrote a piece for AllThingsD about the different ideas of social. Basically, he said the goal isn’t to create something viral, measured by number of fans, or even comment-style engagement. The end goal is create a lasting relationship. How does Tripl do that?
In this iteration, it’s been about building a conversation. Our users have over a thousand interests tagged and we’ve tried to attack it algorithmically but we don’t feel it has the right context sometimes. When you write a post on Tripl, it’s like a structured sentence that has editable parts. It says “I’m looking to meet/network with/party,” then a custom option where you can add tags. It’s similar to how you add people on Facebook with status updates. It forms a sentence and you post it. If you’re a local, all travelers and locals see it, and if you’re a traveler, you engage locals. We match on interests. You’re interested in kayaking and this local had mentioned kayaking before. We alert you and get that conversation started. It’s about forming a conversation in the community, where people feel they’ve made an impact on someone else’s trip. It’s also another way we look at revenue models. Everyone talks about gamification, but maybe the oldest form of it is points and travel. Maybe you earn all these points and apply them to real life rewards. We want to look at engagement the same way. You engage with the community, give advice, meet up with them, even on those days you’re not traveling so when you do travel you can apply those credits and points and get half off your Hilton stay.
I’d heard somewhere that you were a Lean Startup convert. How do you apply that philosophy to Tripl?
At first we were shitty at building product, and it took us a few months to use our sprints efficiently. Then we got good and kept adding other features. In development we’d move onto the next feature but our code would accidently create a dead end on an existing one. We ended up stripping away half of our products and features and found the one or two things that can really spur growth. Now, when we contemplate a product build, before we actually build, we create a button for it asking you to engage. When a user clicks the button, it leads them to an error page and we count those clicks. If you’ve shown something to a thousand people and five clicked, people prove they don’t want it or else we’re not showcasing well. We did that with our login feature. We knew that people wanted to use not only Facebook but Twitter or Foursquare, and when they try to login with those networks, we measure it. When we survey people, we find that people say one thing but clicks say another. We don’t build, we test. Listen, people know you’re a startup so if they land on a funny error page they’re cool with it. That then saves us a month of programming designing and debate in the team.
Anything else you’d like to say?
Social and travel is a really noisy industry and we knew it was coming. It was obvious it would happen. There are a lot of people who have taken the notion of places, like bars to visit or museums to see, but I don’t think there’s a lot of value added. If your friend went to London and checked into Starbucks, big deal, that doesn’t help. So even on a restaurant or intimate neighborhood level, people are already competing on the local level, like Zagats. It’s super crowded and people are trying to do places, like Pinterest for travel. We’re sticking to our thesis that people are the connectors. You don’t actually have to meet but we want the conversation to happen. That’s where we’re letting our users go and now we’re going to learn from them.
