24 histoires de fondateurs
Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia had paying guests within a week of the idea because a design conference had sold out every hotel in San Francisco. Turning that weekend into a company took a year of failed launches, credit card debt and cereal money.
Madhu Pattarambil, a Sydney chemical engineer with no startup background, shipped a free AI travel app in 17 languages in two weeks, funded entirely by travel affiliate commissions.
A non technical founder with a full time job built a flight deals email list on Instapage and MailChimp, priced it at $1, $9 and $19 a month, and had 100 paying members by the end of month one.
Ana Vershinina and two co founders built a travel planner on evenings and weekends around full time jobs. Eleven days after launch: 700 installs and three PRO subscribers.
In 2013, I sold all my possessions, packed a backpack and a laptop, and flew to Thailand to begin my digital nomad life. I was once a lost musician ea...
Peter Xu and Harry Yu (twin brothers) leveraged their Stripe and Google experience to build Wanderlog, now top-ranked for travel planning.
In December 2013, Scott Keyes found a $130 roundtrip flight from New York to Milan. His friends wanted the next one. Three years later, that email list became Going — a subscription service with 2 million members.
Abraham Burak experienced roaming bill shocks as a digital nomad, then built Airalo - now valued at $1B+ with 20M+ users.
Jack turned his personal flight hacking hobby into the UK's leading cheap flight service.
Peter and Harry Yu, twin brothers from Yale, built Wanderlog into the top-ranked trip planning app after previous bootstrapped travel ventures and stints at Stripe and Google.
Aktarer Zaman built Skiplagged at 20, got sued by United Airlines and Orbitz, and won - now helping millions find cheaper flights.
Two years of building a peer to peer student guide platform produced exactly five bookings, three of them from Johannes Reck's mother. Then a Swiss rafting company called.
Mehreen made just $847 from her travel blog in year one. By her first full-time year it brought in $67,000 across six income streams. The turning point was learning SEO and email.
Tavishi Gupta left a salaried job with no backup plan, built Tern from Airbnbs, and grew it to 12,000+ trips planned and paying users in 9 countries with $0 spent on marketing.
Andrew Henderson built a radio broadcasting empire at 22, then faced a 43% tax bill that changed his worldview. He founded Nomad Capitalist to share what he discovered — and built a 60-person global advisory brand.
Two ex-Microsoft engineers built the definitive travel search for getting from A to B anywhere in the world.
Varun Khona built Headout from a 500 Startups incubation to $130M+ revenue, pioneering the managed experiences model.
Matt Kepnes quit his hospital admin job after a trip to Thailand opened his eyes. His travel blog became Nomadic Matt — one of the world's largest travel media brands with over 1 million monthly readers.
Investors told Marcus Rader the short term rental niche was too small. He printed a t-shirt reading Free Beer for Airbnb Hosts, stood on a Toronto street corner for an hour, and spent the next four years getting Hostaway to $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
Scott found a $130 round-trip to Milan and turned his flight-finding hobby into a 2M+ subscriber business.
Three friends frustrated by expensive ski flights built Skyscanner on the side, bootstrapped it to £1,000/day, then sold for £1.4 billion.
A hobby project tracking aircraft in Sweden became the #1 flight tracking app in 130+ countries.
Michael Cameron and Bernie Tschirren built Rome2rio from their parents' living room to 10M+ monthly visitors before selling to Omio.
Frederic Lalonde built Hopper through a scary pivot - from travel blog aggregator to AI-powered booking app with $1B+ in sales.