What is TravelBudds?
Travelbudds is the social network for young, mobile, connected, travel lovers looking for the most authentic ways to discover the world and share their experiences. TravelBudds will be the only tool travelers will need to go through the whole travel lifecycle from inspiration seeking, to organizing & booking, geolocalized tips during the trip and experience sharing.
Through this social network, we aim to become the Travelers’ hub connecting users together and together with service providers, official institutions and brands for our users to benefit both from peer-to-peer advice and from official information.
As of today, in terms of entrepreneurs and official institutions, we target mainly low visited countries and remote places in order to develop entrepreneurship, economic growth, employment and last but not least green tourism.
Why Travelbudds?
We created TravelBudds because we realized that the customer journey in travelling can be really painful. On the one had, we have the online tourism industry which is really crowded. There are many websites, sources, brands, social media groups and people sharing their experiences here and there. And on the other hand, we have millennials who are looking to make the most out of their trips, immerse themselves in the local cultures and have a real experience. However, they don’t have much time to organize and, in majority, they make travel choices based on peer recommendations. Therefore, we decided to create an all-in-one tool to save time while organizing being reassured that the information comes from a person we know who has already had this experience.
Our Journey:
Linley and I met over the summer 2016 from a personal relation. We discussed the project, the needs, the business model and the vision for over 6 months and finally incorporated the company in Mauritius in december 2016. From then on, we started prototyping, designing, developing, beta-testing and our app was born and available in the app store in december 2017. During the first 4 months, we tested and enhanced our solution and one month ago we launched our first communication campaign. We have been on a steady growth in terms of users since the beginning and have just reached 1500 users. Our campaign will go on until September and we hope to follow this track of growth.
Why Participate in Africarena?
We decided to participate to the Africarena tour challenge in Mauritius in order to be visible towards the start-up ecosystem and investors. For us it was the opportunity to meet new people, test our pitch and idea and to show what TravelBudds was about because we are looking for funds shortly. The competition was quite fierce for this pitch contest and it was difficult to actually position your start-up in the whole because there were all sorts of start-ups from different markets, different stages and different technologies.
Honestly, we didn’t really expect to be the winners so we are very proud and extatic to be able to go to the next step. Once again, our marketing campaign showed traction on our product and the Africarena challenge made us realize that judges believed investors could be interested in our start-up. It’s a great leap ahead and we are very happy to have the opportunity to go to Cape Town, be in the pitching program with SchoolLab and have the opportunity to extend our network.
What does this new achievement mean and what will it bring to Travelbudds?
The start-up creation journey is a real emotional journey aswell. Most of the times, you get 100 no’s for 1 yes and the founding team needs a lot of confidence, trust and strength to keep creating. We have not yet been so familiar with the investor’s world and getting feedback on what we have built so far so this achievement is a serious energy boost for the whole team. We are very excited and looking forward to developing our start-up, our team and building our partner network in the next few months.
We also talked to Julien Failu, the founder of Expat.com:
