She quit her job, sold her house, and bootstrapped Triip to profitability

Vietnamese travel startup Triip.me emerged from the experiences of five passionate travellers. During their trips all around the world, they struggled to create perfect itineraries, faced challenges in finding things to do in places they toured, and found the quest to taste the local culture in an authentic way fruitless.

To solve these problems, they founded Triip, which allows anybody with a tour idea to create a limitless number of unique tours rooted in personal travel experiences and local knowledge. These personalized itineraries can then be sold to interested tourists.

Since Tech in Asia first wrote about Triip, it has come a long way. It went beyond Southeast Asia, and opened worldwide. “This is the key decision we made because it’s hard to target who would travel to which place. We realized that filling the Triip inventory with experiences worldwide can help us serve more travellers coming to our site,” Hai Ho, co-founder and principal of Triip.me, says.

In July, Triip won Tech in Asia‘s first ever Startup Arena battle in Ho Chi Minh City.

And three months ago, Triip turned cash-positive, one of the few startups in the region to reach that coveted revenue zone.

From college to cash-positive

The extra ‘i’ in Triip has a significance. “We believe travel experiences should be shared. It will be most fulfilled when you do it with a partner, be it a travel companion, someone you meet on the go, or your tour guide. The double “i” in Triip represents that spirit,” the company website states.

Lam Ha, one of Triip’s co-founders, was in university when she started a student group called Saigon Hotpot. The members of the group interacted with tourists visiting Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City and showed them around, all the while getting a chance to hone their English-speaking skills with foreigners. The students did it pro-bono and within four years, Saigon Hotpot shot up to the top spot of things to do on TripAdvisor.

This metamorphosed into Triip after the founders completed their university education.

After bootstrapping and working part-time on Triip for months, the team realized that a lot more was possible with their startup. “Ha sold her house and quit her job to take up the CEO role of Triip since September,” Hai Ho says. This move gave an immediate boost to Triip, which saw a huge jump in traffic as well as revenue since then.

“Within two months, revenue tripled and the number of users increased by 40 percent,” he says. “We turned cash flow positive three months ago since our cost is almost nothing. In the past 12 months, we spent US$5,000 to cover 66 cities and have 4,200 users. And now, we are building a full-time team to speed up our growth.”