Ravel Profile

“The Ravel Trips platform is a collaborative trip planning tool and marketplace for travelers to match with local experts around the world to plan their next vacation for them.”

“Our mission is to make bespoke personalized trips accessible to travelers around the world by bringing transparency into the planning process while helping small businesses grow. We value sustainable affordable travel options and building trust with equal opportunity for all stakeholders.”

“Friends and family with self-funding of $150,000.”

“The three founders come from diverse backgrounds in pharmaceuticals, financial services, and vehicle automation but we all share an absolute passion for traveling (80 countries visited and counting), so we have felt the pains when planning and booking trips. We're a remote team living in 6 countries. We have Ukrainian developers and designers on our team who have also felt the impact of forced travel. Additionally, we have two interns who have a drive to see the world and learn about a growing business in a rapidly changing industry.”

“While planning a 30-day road trip in Australia, Brice looked for a platform to help him craft a customized trip plan. Reading blogs, guide books, and websites just didn't provide him what he needed. At first, the idea was to solve this by building a trip planning tool and social platform where travelers could share and reuse trips to save planning time. However, it turned out that businesses like travel agencies were the ones most interested in creating the content and gaining clients on a platform like this. After testing a trip planning service with some initial customers, we began to bring on travel agency partners and connect them together. And that's where our marketplace began to take shape!”

“The idea was to make it very simple to plan trips for yourself — to unravel the complexity of travel and make it easy to understand, replicate, and adapt to your needs. ‘Unravel’ and ‘ravel’ are, in fact, synonyms, and it happens that ‘travel’ without a T is ‘Ravel’ … so we chose this name.”

“I always had a dream of starting my own business. I have tried quite a few projects over the past decade with not many of them taking off, but it all came down to the right circumstances and finding the right team to surround myself with, who had the same vision as me.”

“As mentioned in our validation of the product, we found we had been targeting the wrong customer and therefore made a pivot about one year ago. This was also during covid lockdown which meant that no one was traveling and therefore it was impossible to convince people to think about traveling or create content from past trips. This presented an opportunity however for businesses to get their name out there and show what they are capable of creating for clients. Also in building our product in the early days, we didn't have a technical co-founder, but also we didn't have much money to invest to build a product. So we had to really take things step by step — designing, prototyping, convincing some investors, building a basic MVP, pivoting, getting initial clients, reinvesting, and finally building our platform.”

“As we are a two-sided marketplace, we have two main customers. On the supplier side, we target small- and medium-sized travel businesses that plan and book trips for customers (agencies, DMCs, tour operators, single agents). On the demand side, we currently target Gen Y and millennials planning complicated vacations.

It took some time to find the right fit for both sides however through discussions with customers and testing through ads, we were able to determine the best markets. We've also happily found some specific areas for which our platform works really well — for example, honeymoons.”

“We drive visitors to our website through content marketing like blogs, and we do targeted ads for some locations who have decent content and advisors for.”

“At launch, we targeted getting advisors for specific regions and then marketed those regions to customers. This way we could show enough content and be sure we could provide services. Interestingly, 50% of our new business is through referrals.”

“Trip request to conversion ratio, monthly active users, CAC, total trip value, and planning value.”

“Book: ‘Zero to One’ by Peter Thiel.

Podcast: ‘Traction’ with Lloyed Lobo.”

“Vampire Weekend.”

“Slack.”

“How things go either incredibly fast or incredibly slow (or at least it feels like one of the two all the time)”

“Since my team is spread out through many time zones, we have morning and evening meetings. I try to block times for working and times for other things like family. It's really difficult, but I've learned to make a weekly routine where some days are focused on Product for example while other days are for Sales and other days are only for family.”

“I try to schedule work on my calendar and try to stick to the time. This keeps me from either getting bored of a topic or diving too deep and getting lost. In general, I try to take an 80/20 approach to getting things done. Nothing will be perfect, and many things will change anyway, so if it's in the right direction then it's already a great first step.”

“When we got our first clients with reasonably sized contracts, I was spending too much time working and less time with my family. I knew I needed to let one of the three go and I chose my day job. Of course, life isn't as financially comfortable yet, but I certainly have a better work/life balance.”

“After college, I became a production engineer in a manufacturing plant where we packaged pharmaceutical products. During that time I realized that you can learn and grow so much if you just put in the hard work. It's not about how smart or successful you are until that point — you need to put in the time and learn from the people around you.”

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