Trippiece: User-generated Travel Plans Bring Japanese New Experiences

Trippiece is a service that allows you to share your travel plans on the web. The start-up raised funds from Tokyo’s Samurai Incubate and was worth 3.78 million yen (about $50,000) as of last May.  Last week I had a chance to interview Ian Ishida, who is the founder and CEO of the start-up.

Tell me a little your background and what you been doing?

I’m attending Tokyo’s Chuo University majoring in commercial science, and also managing a non-profit organization (NPO) called Unoneicchi (named after the words meaning ‘one’ in French, Spanish, Italian, English, Chinese, and Japanese). The NPO aims to tell people about the world by relaying what its members have seen first hand from developing countries. Previously I used to be an intern for EC-Navi, a Tokyo’s web service which is very active in contributing to Japan’s tech start-up community.

What made you launch the service?

A couple of years ago, I just planned a tour to Bangladesh with my mates in the NPO in order to see how social entrepreneurship is doing in developing countries. We had great success in the tour, and could even see Dr. Muhammmad Yunus, the Nobel Prize Peace winner and the founder/CEO of the Grameen Bank, a Bangladeshi micro-finance and community development bank.

I felt that planning a tour and carrying it out with my mates brought on a great sense of unity. A tour arrangement does not have to be a speciality of only travel agents. I thought that the joy of arranging a tour could be shared by individuals too.

How did you launch Trippiece?

I just started the project with four people including myself. All of us have lived outside our home country, in places like Mainland China, Spain, and Portugal — and that might have contributed to how we developed the concept. We launched it in late February of this year, and succeeded in fundraising seed money from Samurai Incubate.

What kind of travel plans are your users listing on the service?