STARTUP STAGE: Explorely wants to be “Kayak for outdoor travel”

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.

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.