Founders often don’t want to talk about their failures, but Hai Ho, co-founder of Triip.me, is very open about how his travel startup, which was originally about linking up travelers with locals, was on the brink of being shut down in 2014 and 2016.
Photo credit: mihtiander / 123RF.
Local tours, local guides: Just enough to survive
Registered in Singapore and operating out of Ho Chi Minh City, Triip was founded in 2013, three years before Airbnb rolled out its Experiences division in 2016. Both Triip and Airbnb Experiences offer unique encounters for travelers, particularly for those who want to go off the beaten path with knowledgeable locals.
The tour guides on Triip’s platform are referred to as “creators,” as they each craft their own tours. The company’s mission is to change the way people travel worldwide, create jobs for local people, and help cities preserve local cultures.
Triip’s team was hoping to grow its localized tours for a long time, but things did not turn out as planned. In 2014, despite having a presence in 10 countries and listing 300 experiences, the startup was running out of cash, with gross mechandise value only reaching US$20,000 that year. Ho had to sell his only house to bootstrap the venture.
After Gobi Partners backed the startup in 2016 with US$500,000, the company spent a large chunk of the investment on digital marketing. But Triip’s focus on offering localized tours still did not take off. The numbers just did not add up.
“The competition in this travel industry is just absolutely fierce, especially for small guys like us, as most will eventually die after burning investors’ money on marketing efforts,” Ho said during an interview with KrAsia in Hanoi.
The painful experiences of burning cash on Google and Facebook ads turned Ho and Triip’s team to a new mission: They wanted to challenge tech giants by tapping personal data in tourism using blockchain technology.
It is an ambitious idea that confounds even some tech enthusiasts.
In essence, Triip wants to build a marketplace where users can get paid if they choose to share data about their trips and travel preferences. In turn, the company could support hotels, restaurants, and other service providers in mining new tourism insights and data for targeted advertising without having to rely solely on SEO marketing.
Pivoting to blockchain
Ho has extensive experience in developing tech products, with previous stints at firms building payment gateways, wearable hardware, as well as community apps. The team also has Kent Nguyen, former head engineer for Grab Vietnam, as their chief technology officer.
The startup took two years, from 2017 to 2019, to research applications of blockchain technology in tourism, and then officially relaunched its app this year. While the app still offers localized tours guided by normal folks around the world, one of the breakthrough additions is TriipMiles, which can be allocated to users for sharing details about their upcoming travel plans – such as their destinations, hotel bookings, and other preferences – and in exchange, users can use TriipMiles to offset the cost of bookings made using the platform.
Third-party service providers that partner with Triip can also use TriipMiles to buy the data directly from users, and then use that data and other insights for targeted advertising. TriipMiles is different from normal rewards or loyalty points because, according to Ho, the whole process is facilitated by blockchain technology. That means pieces of user data are spread throughout a network of devices, ensuring the security of the details that users share with the company.
To do this, Triip moves “consumer data out of the hands of technology mega corporations and gives it back to the client,” according to a white paper written by the Triip team to explain the concept.
Weathering skepticism
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