Sam Blenkinsopp,
Trippin
Who is Trippin and what do you do?
Trippin is a travel platform powered by our community. We’re on a mission to help people travel with more purpose and to connect the dots between cultures worldwide.
At VIDA, we define Next Generation Media Brands as having one or more of the following characteristics: Being disruptive, having diverse revenue streams, operating across multiple platforms and meeting the needs of an underserved audience/community. How does Trippin’ fit our definition of what it means to be a Next Generation Media Brand?
We were founded on personal frustration within the travel industry. We felt underserved as there really wasn’t a place to find travel recommendations that we actually trusted or content within the space that inspired us. We started out as a Facebook group – that was our first test, just three friends coming together and creating a group to share knowledge and find a solution to a problem. When we noticed the level and quality of recommendations from the people contributing and the fact they were the ones pushing boundaries of innovation and culture around the world, we quickly realised it was more than just a Facebook group and an opportunity to build something from.
For us, our revenue streams are built through four key pillars: Intelligence, strategy, creation and communication. The intelligence piece is about harnessing the power of our global community to uncover insights around culture. It’s about how to be a more purposeful traveller and how to really engage with and understand the people who matter most. The strategy part is using our research to turn into actionable strategies. The creation piece is, again, using our unique position and understanding of global culture to create progressive content and immersive experiences that spark meaningful conversations and build resonance beyond a product or a category. Finally, the communication piece is harnessing the power of our global communities to amplify and communicate storytelling across the globe.
We want to use the power of creativity and our unique knowledge of travel and culture to really disrupt how brands think about approaching their audience.
What’s your ‘why’?
The ‘why’ is very much to understand how to be a more purposeful traveller. It began as a personal frustration, but now we want to do it to help people to be more purposeful and connect those dots around the world.
We define purpose through the lens of your impact on the environment, its people and its culture. We want to demystify the decision-making process around why people go travelling - what destination they’re going to, their travel methods, accommodation, what they’re doing when they get there, what experiences they’re partaking in, what they’re spending their money on and how they’re behaving. We want to educate people on how to be more purposeful and how to understand that topic.
How did you build your brand?
Our brand was built from having a clear set of values, a strong and progressive creative direction and putting our community first. We want Trippin to be a human brand that people resonate with and that stands for making a positive change in the world.
How did you develop your audience?
We harnessed social media and brought our community together IRL through exhibitions and panel talks to grow our audience before we even had a product in place. We've always believed the best way to grow as a business is by running experiments and learning from them.
Our first big experiment was to build an app to offer a more bespoke travel product for our community. The vision was a global platform that is the singular gateway to authentic travel experiences. A social platform
that cuts through the noise & delivers the right information in the right way. We launched a beta with a couple core functionalities but with a lack of serious capital and resources to make the product what we'd dreamed of, we took a step back, spoke with our community, re-visited our mission and assessed our strengths and weaknesses as founders and pivoted.
In April 2019, we launched our next big experiment, which is the website you see today. We collaborate with our community to publish content that connects travel, culture and creativity like never before. We uncover stories that are found at the intersection of social and cultural boundaries. Combining guides and experiences with audio, film and written word to create an ecosystem that empowers people to travel with more purpose. From that moment onwards, we saw our audience grow at a different rate.
How did you increase your revenue?
We've built a platform that's genuinely doing things differently, shaking things up in the travel industry and making waves in the right places. So we've never had to put resources into traditional forms of business development. We're extremely careful about the partnerships we take on and have actually had to turn down more opportunities than we take because our values and intentions as a brand are imperative to us.
How have you raised funds?
We started off with angel capital. I’d be lying if I said it was easy. Our process of raising funds was challenging because it was a world that we weren’t familiar with. We found it extremely hard to find the right people who would invest in us for the right reasons. We’d get offers on the table and the terms weren’t right; or we didn’t believe that the person had the right intentions behind their investment; so it was definitely a long and grueling process. Now, we’re really happy that we have some amazing partners on board who are supportive and believe in us as founders. The support we received when we pivoted was when we knew that the time taken to make sure that we had the right people on board was time well spent.
What’s next?
We want to continue to elevate our content and drive the conversation on purposeful travel. We’re looking at our digital experience and ways we can improve the behaviour. There will also be more IRL experiences too as it's something within our DNA. We’ve always done exhibitions, panel talks, parties - that kind of stuff. Later this year we’re going to be doing a travel film festival in Ibiza and we just did a travel photography exhibition in Mexico City that we’re looking to take to London.
