Explorely
Explorely
is a platform to help travelers find and book campsites and vehicles such as
campervans, trailers and motorhomes around North America, with plans to expand
into Europe.
Founded in 2023 and based
in Vancouver, the company expects to grow its inventory by adding
cabins, glamping tents, yurts and other types of accommodations, CEO Cody Watson said.
What is your 30-second pitch to investors?
We are Kayak for outdoor travel. Outdoor travel
is tricky because instead of dealing with a high degree of concentration in
destinations and several hundred large brands, you’re dealing with a massive
long tail of destinations (lakes, mountains, beaches, deserts) and a massively
fragmented industry made up of tens of thousands of small businesses, hundreds
of booking platforms.
We make it easy for the 90 million outdoor travelers to find places to stay and
book near where they want to explore – in one place. Whether travelers are
planning a once in a lifetime road trip in an RV rental, need an escape from
the city at an RV park or are looking for new campgrounds nearby to hike,
fish or go four-wheeling, we make all of that visible and comparable in minutes,
not hours.
Location
Vancouver, Canada
Describe both the business and technology
aspects of your startup.
Our goal is first and foremost to make it easier
for outdoor travelers to connect with outdoor accommodations that fit their
travel profile. We work with booking platforms to surface these destinations to
these travelers and offer them options to increase their profile on our app for
their target customer.
Our platform is built on the latest tech stack
so that we can move fast and adapt to changing traveler needs and evolving
customer segments. Our front end is built with React/NextJS, and back end is
built with NodeJS and backed by MongoDB (MERN stack) for super fast searches
and great flexibility as our business evolves. We aren’t fixed to any one
technology, so as we see needs change in the market, we will adapt quickly to
meet them.
Give us your SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of the company.
- Strengths: Currently the largest outdoor travel
website in North America by inventory. - Weaknesses: We’ve taken the approach of
aggregating rather than selling directly. This simplifies our business on one
hand and lets us focus on traveler needs, but because we don’t have a hand in
the transaction, our revenue opportunities are limited. For this reason, we are
hyper-focused on being efficient with our costs and solving problems that our
customers and partners are telling us, rather than our nice ideas. Secondly, we
don’t aggregate any spots that don’t allow reservations. So for consumers that
leave their travel up to chance at “first come, first served” destinations – we
aren’t the right one. - Opportunities: International expansion is on our
radar – there are millions of beautiful destinations around the world, and we
want to make them accessible to everybody. - Threats: There are established competitors that
have taken similar approaches to us, but haven’t focused as closely on our
aggregation goal. If they were to choose to move into this space, they could
easily roll over and dominate us due to their established SEO presence.
What are the travel pain points you are trying
to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?
From a customer perspective, we are trying to
dramatically compress the amount of time it takes to plan an outdoor trip.
There are thousands of sites a traveler could possibly visit to plan an outdoor
vacation and likely dozens or hundreds depending on their specific destination.
We boil that all down to one.
Additionally, for consumers looking for an RV rental, our “packages”
feature helps streamline planning an RV rental trip by coupling RV search and
RV site search into one journey. Before this existed, guests needed to visit,
at minimum, two sites to plan their RV rental trip and might find that their
RV is not compatible with the site in question, or that as they search for one
or the other, they are left without an RV or left without a campsite.
For the industry, we’re trying to get more
visibility for destinations and RV rentals by really spending a lot of time on
building strong traffic for them so that they can command a premium price for
their product. With costs inflating across the industry for operators, they are
getting squeezed like crazy. Since the price they can charge is largely
dependent on how many travelers know about and want to book their
product, we’re trying to increase that volume so that they can escape that
price pressure.
So you’ve got the product, now how will you get
lots of customers?
To start, we’ve engaged with agencies known to
grow the initial stages of the largest players in the traditional travel space
(Kayak, Expedia, Booking, Orbitz, Hotwire, etc.) to apply their playbook to our
business model. We’re keeping our approach super simple and focused. In the
medium term, our super fast, simplified search experience will drive referral
traffic.
Tell us what process you’ve gone through to
establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable
market.
Prior to working on this concept, I was head of
product for RVezy, a peer-to-peer RV rental marketplace. While I was there, I
did a round of customer research with customers and non-customers and found
that there was real hesitation around the difficulty of understanding and
planning a trip into the outdoors. A lot of that need is serviced by apps and
websites in the space, including some like Sekr that try to do it all in one
app. Nobody was addressing the elephant in the room – renting an RV is an incredibly
challenging proposition on its own, let alone trying to book your RV spots and
your rental in one journey.
RV parks and RV rental providers don’t make it any easier with their ancient
booking systems and litany of rules to actually book their product. By bringing it
all into one place, we can let guests book both their rental and their spot in
one journey, as well as distill down that booking process to find inventory
that is exactly compatible with what they are looking for in their trip.
In the early days of thinking about Explorely, I happened to listen to the podcast “How I
Built This” with Paul English, co-founder of Kayak, and that inspired me to expand the concept to enable me to scale beyond that
single initial problem and build a more defensible competitive advantage. The
hard TAM [total addressable market] for RV rentals is north of $1 billion per
year, and 90 million Americans camp every year. Turning more
campers into RVers is within reach with the right understanding of the
customer, and that’s what we intend to do as we become the de facto Kayak
for outdoor travel.
How and when will you make money?
We make money when partners pay us to display
their listings or send a successful booking their way. At our current growth
rates, we will be marginally profitable this year, which has been important to
me from day one. Growth at all costs is a dangerous game and leads to a lot of
incrementalism, so keeping costs low and having a clear path to scalability has
been top of mind for me every single day.
What are the backgrounds and previous
achievements of the founding team?
I’ve spent 15 years in analytics, working very
closely with leaders across a number of industries (insurance, Fortune 500 brand
strategy, aviation, online dating and marketplaces), which has allowed me to
pick up a very diverse understanding of both growth and cost control from both
a qualitative and quantitative angle. My previous role was head of product for
RVezy, where I completely rebuilt their analytics and product teams’ systems
and ways of thinking and worked with engineering to accelerate our
development. That role allowed me to gain a very deep understanding of the
outdoor travel space, ensuring adequate domain expertise for Explorely.
One of my advisors has committed to becoming my
technical co-founder in the coming months (I actually told him to hold off until
it was at a point where we could use him). He has been chief technology officer at a number of
companies in the travel space over the past 20 years, including at two
aggregators that were in the hotel space (B2B and B2C). He has been immensely
helpful in ensuring that we are scaling and thinking in a disciplined way about
what needs to be a priority now versus later. He shares my ethos around cost control
and building in an agile and measured way.
How have you addressed diversity and inclusion
within your business?
Since we’re so small, I haven’t had the chance
to address this at an employer level, but I can say that while I was
researching the problems in this space, I was acutely interested in the
perspectives and experiences of immigrant communities when it comes to
understanding how to experience outdoor travel. Interviewing people from China
and India who immigrated to my own city (Vancouver), opened my eyes to how
privileged I have been to have a family that hikes, camps and travels to see
the stunning outdoor sights this world has. Simple things like “Am I
allowed to drive an RV?” or “Will bears attack me?” can be
addressed with Explorely that unlock the outdoors for everyone.
What’s been the most difficult part of founding
the business so far?
Being a bootstrapping solopreneur is a unique
experience. The first three months (and the occasional day since) has ups and downs
of “this is never going to work” and “this is going to be
amazing.” As somebody who loves collaborating with other people and
leading teams in an inclusive manner, being the sole decision maker and solely
accountable at the same time, while putting my family’s income and assets on
the line has been an emotional challenge where I continually question myself.
The odd mention of “When you’re looking for investment, I want to be
first,” daily climb in metrics, customer interview that is receptive to
the concept, and occasional press mention is enough to keep me going through
the more difficult days.
Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough
time making an impact – so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?
First, I don’t accept no for an answer. The
travel industry is very stuck in its ways, particularly the outdoor travel
industry. Since I am so lean, I can do things that nobody else can. This is
compounded by the fact that those with resources in the space really do face
the innovators dilemma – they have precarious business models and are often B2B
or B2B2C, so have difficulty getting past the power dynamics of that B2B
element. I am not bound by any of this.
A year from now, what state do you think your
startup will be in?
We will be the leading partner for all three United States-based
RV rental partners and will have a deep presence in Europe. We will have a
first round of angel investment and will have unaided brand awareness of 5-10%.
What is your end-game (going public, acquisition, growing and staying
private, etc.)?
My philosophy on an exit is “it depends.” If we are growing
rapidly and there is more gas in the tank and more large steps we can take to
drive incremental value, we will keep going until that stops. Exits seem to be
rare in this space beyond where my roadmap takes me about three to five years out (they
are typically less than $2 million), so there is a strong possibility that this is a
10-year journey toward an IPO like Kayak.
That being said, if the right offer comes along at the right time, anything is
possible. The outdoor travel industry desperately needs some consolidation to
build real brand value and economies of scale, and I’m happy to be a leader or
follower of that when the time comes.
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