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Alyssa Ravasio

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2021-04-29
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2021-04-29
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  1. “Was very recent. I feel like I'm the recipient of lots of kindness, but this was very recent. I was sitting on a rock at the end of my street here and was having a really hard day. I had one of those days where you just realize a couple big hard things need to happen that you don't want to do, but they need to happen. And you're just like, damn it. And I was actually crying. I was talking to my coach and just like working through things. This woman just pulled over her car, walked right up to me and handed me this little silver heart. She was like, you looked like you needed this. Remember that life is good. And I was like, wow, you had no idea how much I needed that. Thank you. Never seen her again since. I live in a very small like thousand person farming. Never seen her again since. I still have the heart here on my desk and just seeing how much a random person who's never seen someone the before can just want to put themselves out there be a total awesome.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Monarch butterfly, or figuring out a local stream that needs your help cleaning it up to support the local fish or frog, like can look like anything. I really believe that figuring out how to have a positive impact, we say leave it better, which is really a very intentional play on leave no trace. There's so much great stuff about leave no trace, but if you look at how many people there are on the earth, we need to do better than leave no trace. It's not actually really realistic at this point. We need to figure out how to be net positive to the earth. And I think that's possible. We're only going to get there if people can really fall back in love with nature and come from that place of wanting to protect what they care about.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Crazy hectic experiences on this earth to protect it. And that's going to look different for everybody, but I think so much of what I see happening around climate change today, around biodiversity loss today is really fear-driven. People are destroying the earth. You're the problem. Showerless, eat less meat, drive a Tesla and you're just like, god damn it. Like it gets really depressing to be told to just get smaller all the time. And when you also look at the numbers and you see population rise and you see how many billions of people want to live like you and I do with refrigerators and cars, this whole idea that by being slightly less incrementally bad, we're going to solve the problem is just ridiculous on its face value. And so I think instead coming from a place of love and a love for the outdoors and then really figuring out how you can develop your own system of having a positive impact on the world. To me, that's a much stronger way to create change on the world. And so that might look like learning how to compost or planting a certain species to support the”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Diversity in a lot of the conservation science we use today. And the theory is that people have an innate love for nature. And when you go outside, when you spend time with plants and with animals and when you see beautiful rivers and trees, there's just something inside of you that's like just kind of naturally falls in love with it. Like you can't help it. And so when we get more people outside, that biophilia phenomenon occurs and people just fall in love with nature. It doesn't happen every person every time, right? You need to be comfortable. You need to feel safe. A lot of things get in the way of that. But for most people, most of the time, you get outside. You're going to fall in love with nature. That's just a general shape of the dynamic. And then what's so important about that, especially given everything happening on our planet today, is we protect what we love. So when we fall in love with nature, we develop the motivation that we need to then figure out what we might do in our own lives and our own.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “On a personal level and on a human, like micro level. And I think the science is now really proving this, which is exciting. When people get outside, they become happier, healthier versions of themselves. And again, the science is just showing this to be true now. Back when we started, the company, it was more of a personal belief that I now feel I'm like, okay, good, it's validated science. So I think just from a like overall wanting people to be happy and enjoy their lives, getting more people outside is just a really high leverage way to encourage that and really make that possible for people. That's a big one. And I think that's really at the core of why this matters so much to me. And then if we zoom out to a macro level, it's really important as really the catalyst for one of my big theories of change, maybe my biggest theory of change, which is that when people get outside, there's this phenomenon known as biophilia. It's a theory postulated by Io Wilson, who I think is one of our greatest living scientists, grandfather of biology.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “That's coming to mind actually is a glamping retreat. It's just south of the Bay Area in Pescadero. One of her big focuses is on equine healing. So she sells alongside your hip camp. We do have the feature now where you can add on extra experiences or products or services. And she actually sells equine therapy. And so you can go spend time with these horses and she actually leads you through a session where you really get to get in touch with how you're feeling. Horses are amazing mirrors for people. They can tell if you're nervous. They can tell if you're scared. They can tell if you're worried. Sometimes just being seen by that horse is incredibly healing. So she said children come who are autistic and really struggling with communication who leave being able to talk from a couple sessions with horses. And that to me, like I knew nothing about that whole space. And it's been a huge part of, I think, what's really driven the success of her hip camp and her platform. And it's been pretty much.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “You just get to start earning income off of your lands, this giant underutilized asset. And then one incredible trend we see that a lot of our host experience is look, they're smart entrepreneurs. They see their customer. They understand their business. They might start with RVs and then they earn, you know, $10,000, $15,000. And they're like, hmm, I think I'm going to build a couple tent platforms in an outdoor shower. Hmm. I think I'm going to build an outdoor kitchen. Hmm. I think I'm going to build a cabin or a tree house. And so our average host earns three times as much in their second year as their first year.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Location, we have hosts that earn well into six figures and are able to really drive a lot of that income. That tends to be the hosts who are really close to urban areas or really close to the entrance to a big national park. In one of those two areas, you're earning opportunity, you know, absolutely is in the tens of thousands of dollars a year, if not hundreds. The more general host who's in an area, you still have the opportunity to generate thousands of dollars a year. We have an average order value around $100 to $200, so it's still a nice chunk of cash. And I think what's really powerful about an outdoor type of experience, there's no sheets to change. It's not like a bathroom to clean. And so I think having a lower effort way to generate income off the land is really important. And so for a lot of our hosts, I'll actually start with just RVs in vans. And for the most part, those are self-contained. And so you really don't have to invest in infrastructure. There's not much cleanup.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Into the land all the time and bringing ideas and contacts and information. We hear all the time that hip camp hosts have their children who previously had left home come back because now there's like cool people on the ranch to hang out with and there's a business to manage and there's an economic future that actually is enticing and interesting. I had a host tell me recently that her kids she's a farmer and her kids previously have been really embarrassed to be farmers. They viewed it as lesser than and they were the dirty kids and whatever and all these city kids come and they're like seeing that they know how to like harvest chicken eggs from the coop and like take the goats out to the field and now they're like proud to be farmers. They're like this is amazing. Seeing yourself through someone else's eyes especially in a country that for some reason has really looked down on the people who are taking care of land which is ridiculous for a long time is powerful. And then of course the financial side is critical as well. So I think for your average host it really depends.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Would say there's a couple ways in which a host really experiences hip camp and feels this. One is that it's just amazing to get to share your land with other people and watch them enjoy it and be part of that experience. So for a lot of our hosts, they join because they're interested in the finances and they end up staying. Of course, the income is helpful, but they also end up staying because they're like, wow, I'm like helping these poor nature starved city people. actually relax. I hear all the time people like, I love looking at how people look when they show up and how different they look when they leave their hair's down, they're smiling, their face looks different, they're holding their partner's hand, like getting to be part of holding space for people to have that critical restorative time that's so hard to find often in our culture today. That's some of the stuff that I hear our hosts really be the proudest of. I also hear them talk a lot about how much it impacts them and their family to have cool urban people come.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I'm so grateful. I had a good doctor who was like, this should not happen. What the heck is going on in your life? Let's talk about what's happening in your life. That was a good little wake-up call for me. And I think it's just been incredible and feels so obvious. I remember reading around that same time that Richard Branson's number one advice to entrepreneurs was exercise. This is his top piece of advice. It's just been incredible learning how for me it was meditation. It was exercise. It was eating healthier. It was never compromising on sleep. I stopped using alarm clocks. I'm an early riser by nature, so I can do that. I don't set alarm clocks. I haven't for years so that I can let my body take what it needs in terms of sleep. And that has been probably the single greatest transformation to my ability to be a great CEO.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Was so shocking about it, it really shouldn't happen until you're really, really old because it's a signal that your immune system was so suppressed that this virus, it's then in your body for decades, it's like, now is our moment. Let's go When I was like 25, okay?”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “The biggest one, probably like lots of entrepreneurs. My first few years were characterized by really late nights and take out at like 930. And like I grew up an athlete and I just like stopped exercising. Don't have time for that where that got me in pretty short order was just really stressed out, not able to have access to my higher cognitive functions that are required of a CEO or any leader needing to make hard decisions. And just in general, not able to really function at the level that the company needed me to. And so I had actually got shingles.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Oh, so many. One of my favorite things about startups, and this is true for the founder, and this is true for all team members, is that startups are pressure cookers and thus their accelerators for people, much like YC as an accelerator for a startup. You just grow so fast, especially in a company that's growing. So there's a lot of, gosh, there's a lot of ways to answer that. I'll do a couple. The one that comes first to mind actually is around the importance of taking care of myself and showing up with the ability to be in peak performance mode.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Less for a small transaction, you take more on the demand side, and there was no impact to conversion on checkout. That was a really good learning for the company. It was a good moment of humility for me where you kind of come in with this religion and then you just, you got to pay attention to what the community is saying and what the data is saying and you change your mind.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, it actually changed a bit. I think originally we charged 20% or 15% to our house and we had no booking fees. I didn't like booking fees. Thought it was cool as like a customer. I don't know. It's like always one of the most annoying things on Airbnb to me as like when you find something amazing and then you're like, that is so different from the price I saw on the search page. And look, HipCamp does that too now because it makes sense. So here's why. So we started that way. And in my mind, I was like, well, look, these hosts should recognize the logic and wanting to build a notebooking feed platform. And they should just charge more. Well, what actually happened was a huge amount of our early hosts were like, this is so unfair. Why do we have to pay the full fees? Why are the campers getting to pay nothing that feels like not the sharing economy? The sharing economy should be shared fees. And so we ended up piloting, started as a pilot, where we then took that fee. So our total take rate is a little over 20%. And we split it. So it's about 10% on the host side. And then like a similar amount varying on the size of transaction, right, for a bigger transaction.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Or something. I was like, okay, okay, that makes sense. Now, as our platform gets more professionalized, our customer base is starting to move that way too. And so now we have hosts, in addition to these incredible new hosts that actually have full camping businesses. They have 50 different sites across hundreds of acres. They have 100 sites. And they're coming in with a whole new expectation of what they want from us business model-wise. And I think one big thing we've been reckoning with is how do we work with partners who are able to generate a lot of their own demand. So for a lot of these businesses, there's not great campground booking software out there. They want to use hipcamp for their whole business, but they've got a big website. They've got a big Instagram. They're sending us business all day, every day. They're like, we don't want to pay you that take rate. That's kind of crazy. And so we've started to really have those conversations. And I think over time, we'll just have to develop different business models for different types of hosts.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Business model is exceedingly simple, which I'm very proud of. We have GMB, so Gross Marketplace volume. We take a percentage of every bookie, and that is our only revenue stream. We have said no many times over to advertising or any, it's just like, no, focus. Like this is an incredible scalable business model has very excellent margins. Like, let's focus on scaling this one model. So it's a pretty simple business. This is actually fairly recent, a really interesting and powerful thing we're going to have to reckon with, which is that our platform, as we start to build out more and more tools and functionality, is now able to serve a more professional host. So previously, the average host on HIPCAM has about two sites, about half of them only have one on their whole property. And for those hosts in general, I'll talk to them, even the really successful ones. And I'll often ask like, hey, what do you think about our take rate? Should it be lower? And they're like, no, I'd rather you spend more on building messaging in the mobile app for me.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “A set of host standards. We created new requirements like you've got to have at least two acres, in addition to many other things. And then we actually went through the very painful process of offboarding about a quarter of our community, about one in four hosts we had to do, and we called them all. It was terrible. We had to call them and say, hey, we're so sorry. We know that this is probably creating some level of value for you, but this actually isn't in line with our standards. And here's our standards, and here's where you don't map. In some cases, people were able to close the gap, and in some cases they weren't. It was a hard experience in May 2019. At least the first half of the year, a pretty hard year for growth because we were already supply constrained and then just had offboarded a quarter of the supply we had, but it was absolutely the right decision and it allowed us in 2019 to build much stronger processes around quality control, around looking for those early indicators. We now have a whole system set up where if we see someone who has enough of those kind of indicators early on, we're looking at them proactively and having those conversations.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Out in the mountains, my feed, my search result I was in West Hollywood at the time, became populated with driveways, a parking lot in Hollywood where you could sleep in bunk beds someone had put in a semi truck. Stuff that, while technically, I guess, was like outdoor accommodations was just not about nature, not about the land and not about getting outside. And it had some traction, by the way. And so that was a thing our previous quality metrics to that point in time. We had QA, we were looking at listings. But as long as they were getting booked, we were like, okay, I guess the community wants them. Like, we don't want to have too heavy of a hand and saying yes, no, yes, no. But that experience changed me forever. I was actually, I think, on the phone with Sarah where I called her right after Sarah Tavel at Benchmark. And I was like, oh my gosh, you have no idea how people are using hip camp here. This is so weird. I just don't think this is right. It was one of the hardest decisions that I had to make as a CEO, but we ended up creating.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “We were able to grow supply really quickly. It was very exciting. It was only really our second or third year of doing this. We were like, we figured it out. We've cracked the code. And then this weird thing happened where the average percentage of people leaving a positive review started dipping. The ratio of safety or experience issues where people had a bad enough experience. They were reaching out to our support team started increasing. And we started hearing from local regulators who were concerned about what we were doing for the first time ever. And all of this started happening kind of at once really quickly. As so many of these things happen, you have this just random, call it random, call it coincidence because you have this moment where you're just in the right place of the right time. And in this case, I was in LA, I think for maybe like an interview, maybe like a news thing. I wanted to find a hip camp to stay at that night. So I was just in LA and I was like, you know, maybe I'll just drive out of the city for a couple hours. I had the time and I'll find a cool ranch to stay on in Malibu or out in.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Actually, I have a bit of trauma around this one still. It's so interesting. Marketplaces when they're working, if you're not careful, they can really get away from you. And that actually happened to us in 2018. We found Facebook ads. Ooh, and we were like, wow, look at all this supply we can create so quickly. This is amazing. What have we been doing calling all these landowners? Let's just buy ads. Facebook ads are actually still an important part of our strategy as this other digital advertime. As one of our investors calls it the crack. You got hooked on the crack.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Includes tent camping, RV camping, and then, of course, structures, so glamping, cabins, yurts, our hosts all the time are just pulling us and saying, hey, I host amazing weekend workshops on harvesting lavender and distilling the lavender into essential oil, where I do an incredible outdoor dinner with like a live band and I'm only 30 minutes outside of Nashville and I can hip camp please become a home for all these ways that people might want to get outside, be it something where they're spending the night or just coming for a dinner or potentially coming for a whole week. I think over time building out a platform that's truly about connecting people in the land and in all the ways that might happen is both an important way for us to create value for our hosts, but also an important way to really build a community that uses the platform in a way that is most relevant to them. Not everybody wants to sleep outside all the time, you know?”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Has shown from a financial and from just a growth standpoint, it's a huge opportunity prior to COVID, we had markets in the United States. They're only available in the US. We had markets in the US where over a third of the people booking were coming from other countries. And so we know that this is a business that over time is going to trend towards global network effects.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Global first. I really, really don't want to have an American company that happens to be in other countries. To me, the opportunity here to build a community that's global in nature, that cares about the land, that is protective of the outdoors. That's such a big opportunity that I just don't want to miss it. And so over the next five years, expanding into lots of different countries in a way that's truly respectful of those countries, different lands and cultures like that to me is one of the coolest versions that this can become, you know, imagine going to Japan and getting to stay on a tea farm and going to Costa Rica and staying in the jungle and a treehouse, like having those truly authentic experiences where much like the wellness themed hip camp in Oregon, you can step into someone's worldview and really experience what they think is possible for how people in the land might coexist and see that across the world. I'm personally very excited about that, obviously. And I think as our business.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “At least a couple answers to that one I would love for hip camp to truly fulfill the potential of making the outdoors feel accessible even in popular times of year because right now the reality is unfortunately we sell out early for a lot of our best spots for a lot of the year it was at a conference that Jason Horowitz hosted and it was really cool for me because obviously specific demographic but so many people knew about hip camp. They're like, I love hip camp, hip camp's great. By the way, you know that all your stuff gets sold out around the bay. And I was like, I know we're working on it. And that kind of defeats the purpose of what we want to do if we're just yet another sold out, hard to get into outdoor experience. We haven't really fulfilled what's possible here about making the outdoors feel truly easy for you to get access to on a regular basis. So that's one big one. Another one that's really important to me and really coming into focus just in the last six months or so is building a community that is truly”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Walk into her worldview of how people might enjoy the land. And it's just so radically different from a traditional campground or like something else you've probably seen in the outdoors that those experiences too can be quite transcendent and that you're like, whoa, like this is also, I can be sitting outside in a bath filled with rose petals and then step inside and have a chamomile tea that was grown on the herb garden along the river. And like that's getting outside too. Like that's interesting. That's magical.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Really help them understand it's not like, oh, if you have showers, that's the thing that's going to create the magical experience. It's more of this kind of aggregate emergent result of where expectations set in a way that they were eventually exceeded through one way, shape, or form or another. That's been a big one. And then, you know, I would also say the more thought and uniqueness a host really instills into the experience, I think the higher likelihood of really creating that experience. So for example, I was recently at a hip camp up in Oregon. This host has probably 100, 200 acres along a river, but they've built out this incredible, it's a wellness-themed hip camp. There's outdoor saunas, there's outdoor bathtubs right on the river. There's a tea house. And so when you stay there, you're just kind of walking into this beautiful woman. Her name is Mea. She actually has a festival called Spirit Weavers with like thousands of women every year. And you're really getting to.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Actually, a big data science question for us right now. What we see happen is someone will make another booking right away. Like in the first couple days, they get back. That's pretty obvious. But I would say so much of it comes down to the host. Are they someone who's really being thoughtful about creating an experience in a way that's going to become magical or has the potential to? And then of course the land. If you have like 200 acres to yourself with a private waterfall and a swimming hole, even if the gate code was wrong and you had to wait an hour, you probably show up and you're like, this is the best thing ever. It's a really good question because I can tell you like I go to hip camps all the time. Of course, I talk to hosts all the time. I feel it. Like you just feel it. No. But we do need to build out the data science model to not only be able to better predict which hosts are going to be able to facilitate that experience, but also to help the whole community get closer to that.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Investing more in press, it's like, oh, I think they saw an article in self magazine. Now, not many landowners are going to read self magazine, but their nieces, nephews, daughters, sons, they might. So figuring out how to hack and kind of find more ways to kick off the flywheel that you know is working has been big for us too.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Experience as a hip camper, someone getting outside on the platform, those are the people who call their family members and their friends and who really kind of just being maniacally obsessed about what makes that experience magical, how can we make that happen as often as possible. That has become word and center. And then of course, you know, always thinking of ways like, for lack of a better word to kind of hack the system is really good too. One example of that is local press for us, right? It takes time for people to actually go hip camping or bring their friends, et cetera. How do we reach those people faster? Getting an incredible article that really explains the company and what we do in the mission, that also can lead people to go call their family member or their friend. And so often when I hear somebody say, my family member or my friend called me, that's why I decided to sign up as a host on hip camp. And I ask them, where did they hear about us? Often it's because they went hip camping, but increasingly because we're”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “I like that framing of natural groove. I'm a big believer that as entrepreneurs, you hear the term builder a lot, and I think that's true, but I often view it as more of a sculptor chipping away parts of a block to see what might be possible to exist underneath. And there's just this intrinsic shape of the market that I'm not always going to be able to impact and certainly not create from scratch. And landowners just being kind of hard to reach is one of those things. It's just, it is what it is. I can't just spend $10 million on ads next year and expect that to completely transform. So for us, it's manifested in a couple ways, simple things like referrals and adding calls to action to do referrals in the right place in the life cycle. That's obvious. It's also led to something we always have cared about a lot, but now see through a new light, which is just recognizing that the difference between a good experience and like a magical experience is everything. So when people have that truly magical.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “That solves that problem we've been talking about for years about you don't know how you're going to make the blueberry farm work, but you don't want to sell it. This could work. This could be the answer. So demand creating supply wasn't something we kind of.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Like they have land to manage. They're out on the land doing lots of work. And so just figuring out how to reach these people, that has been our biggest challenge. It continues to be our biggest challenge. I have a hard time imagining it won't always be our biggest challenge. I just think it's structurally what's so challenging about building this company. And look, we've made a ton of great progress on it. The primary way we reach landowners today, and this has been consistent for a long time, is just through word of mouth. And surprisingly, Of course, sometimes landowners join and they make lots of money and they're really excited and they start talking about it, especially if we have density in a local area where it gets out, we really can see a market start to take off that way. But more often than not, it's actually somebody goes hip camping. Their eyes are open to this new type of outdoor experience. And then on the drive home, they call their dad. They call their aunt. They call their older brother. And they're like, hey, this is perfect for you.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “I don't know if we've overcome it. I think it continues to be our hardest challenge, which is just reaching landowners. In general, we continue to have far more demand than supply. There are way more people who want to get outside on a beautiful piece of land where they have space to themselves and often a really unique experience, be that beautiful glamping tent or access to a farm stand with fresh meat and produce from the land on which they're staying. People want that. That's kind of an easy sell. What's been more challenging as a company is how do we reach these landowners in a way that's scalable, makes sense financially, and also kind of sets people up in the right mindset to be good members of the community and kind of show up in the right way. Because landowners in general are just, they're hard to reach. They're not spending lots of time on their computer or watching TV or reading magazines.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “To intrude, but if you need some help, I'd love to help. And for some of our host sets, like their favorite part of hosting is really being part of the movement to get people outside and introducing more people to how to do so safely and responsibly.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Big interesting learning for us as a company and as a community has been our mission, which is get more people outside, intrinsically involves making the outdoors accessible to people who aren't already experienced and educated outdoors people. So that leads to all sorts of interesting moments of people who maybe they don't actually know how to pitch a tent. Maybe they don't actually know how to light a campfire or manage it safely. And so we've just invested a lot in education. We're proud members of the recreate responsibly coalition. We've got all sorts of educational touch points both in our checkout flow and after you make a booking where we're really bringing people along on this outdoor journey and trying the best we can to be a surrogate or a standard for having that parent or that friend who taught you all those things at some point in your life and often our host stepped in as well. I talk to hosts all the time who will see a hip camper group that can't get their tent up or can't get their fire shredded and they'll kind of be like, hey, don't.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Getting our insurance policy, which covers our hosts for any liability incident, was just a huge milestone for the company. And it was pretty hard at first. We finally connected with an amazing advisor, Sarah Swenson, who would help build a marketplace for boat rentals, a peer-to-peer marketplace for boat rentals. She was able to connect us to an insurance broker who's fantastic. And they were like, we got you. Don't worry. Previously, we were letting random people rent other random people's watercraft. So like, this is easy. I remember the day we got insurance because we were able to call up all these landowners who we talked to who were like, I can't do this until you guys can protect me and give them all signed up right away. I think actually in law school, there's like some case studies they go through where it's like someone trespassed onto someone's land and broke their leg and still sued the landowner somehow. It's just crazy how a lot of legal structures build around liability on land. And so having that policy has been critical there. I would say another.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Reality on the ground and with any marketplace that has an offline component. My strong perspective is that your product, it is that offline experience. Your website and all the apps are important products, but they really serve as ways for people to access the real product, which is this outdoor experience. And so SMS was a huge part of the solution there. And then we have a lot of gate code access instructions. And so you can imagine if you don't have the gate code and you drive up to a gate at 9 p.m. on a Friday, that's a big problem without cell phone service. So we've just invested a lot in building again really structured data that our hosts really fill in. Do you have a gate code? What is it? Okay, here you go, making sure that campers don't get that until it's time for them to arrive, but making sure they get it so that they can actually access the property even without service. So it continues to be a big learning process, but that was a huge part of the original learning curve.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Biggest one is that a lot of hip camps exist in places where cell phone service doesn't work. Early on, we didn't have a mobile app. We actually only built our mobile app to see a year and a half ago. And part of why we waited so long to build the mobile app is we created this very funny solution of just relying heavily on SMS. So if we knew you were going hip camping, let's say tomorrow, we would text you all the directions, all the access instructions, and be like, screenshot this, or luckily, you know, people can access their text history even without cell service. So we knew they could get to it. Whereas like if we had just emailed that to people, depending on your email client, you might not be able to load your email out of the middle of the wilderness. So we pretty quickly moved to SMS. It's also one of the primary ways our hosts still interact with hip camp, even though we have an app now for a lot of them. The SMS is still actually the primary interface. So I think just really paying attention to the”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “In the West, with all of the fire danger that we have because most landowners are completely financially responsible for dealing with any fire management prevention or fire risks, it's really scary. And that was like our first customer four months in. And so I think being able to create that much value and unlock that much value on what was previously a fairly underutilized asset, certainly the most valuable asset that they owned as a family, that was only possible because we bootstrapped demand so effectively leading up to that moment.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “For a lot of the dates of their summer. It was amazing because mountain hardware really was helpful in like launching the concept, introducing the category, getting some of that initial awareness. But we were also just able to put their ranch on our search results. And people started booking it right away. So I think getting that demand going put us in a position to create a lot of value for our landowners, for our hosts, for our partners there right away. And that was really important because then that host was like completely blown away at how much money they made that first summer. They actually told me at the end of this summer he's a father of a few children. He said this property, fun fact, one in a dice game during the gold rush era by his great-great-grandfather been in the family for hundreds of years. No real clear intention or purpose for it, but they don't want to sell it. They love it. And he said up until finding hip camp, this property has always felt like a bit of a liability. I've been worried to pass it on to my children because the cost of land management, especially.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Wish I could tell you this was my brilliant master plan and it worked so well, but this was a beautiful accident, I'd say. Because we started by aggregating existing public campgrounds, we bootstrapped demand. We had demand. People liked the product. They understood how valuable it was to have that unified data set and infrastructure and interface to look at all their camping options across different government agencies. When we began working with private land, it was as simple as just slotting them in there. and making them visible to our community. So because we already had the demand community, our very first host is another fun grit story, a beautiful ranch in Northern California. They have, I think it's about 300 acres and a beautiful world-class fly fishing river running right down the middle of it. We got them to join by convincing mountain hardware to purchase $15,000 worth of camping from them, basically pre-book.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Analytics back then, and showers became and remains one of the most widely used filters because people before hip camp did not have a unified way to say, I only want to see my camping options with showers. Thank you very much. But that became, I think, again, a way that in a little way back then, we just made the outdoors a lot more accessible to people.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Was actually showers shocked me. And we also back then this is another fun early grit story, I somehow talked the RAI on Brandon Street in San Francisco into letting me just put like a table in front of their store. So I would just like sit there for days and just talk to people coming in and give them we had stickers. I'd be like, all right, do you like to camp? If so, because you look at this website quickly, could you give me some feedback? And I was shocked at how often, especially men would tell me they've been trying to get their girlfriend or wife to go camping with them. It's been a huge push, but she's only going to go if there's hot showers. It is like a deal breaker, which was surprising to me because that is certainly not a deal breaker for me. So I was like, what? There are people out there who will only camp if there's showers. And then it was cool because the data, we had some data tracking.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “So that was literally how we built the data set originally. It was just grit. I'm an organizer. I love when things are color coded and organized in their category. So I got an incredible amount of pleasure from organizing the data around our parks.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Data set across different previously separated and isolated silos of data was really helpful for people. So our process to build that data set, because we did build it from scratch. There wasn't like an easy API that I just got to pull down. My two little sisters, my original film production company employees and my best friend Natalie and I spent probably a couple of months just literally going, it's funny. We would literally go to like the state park website or the county park website. We'd often find sometimes some data on the website, but often it would be in the form of a PDF map. And we'd be like, is there a shower icon on the map? There is. Okay, put yes in that Google Sheet Excel column. And then I would write a script that would pull the Google Sheet into the database. I recently learned how to code partially out of wanting to create this website. And so I was good enough to do some data import.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Super fun if you're a data nerd like me. So the first thing was to create a data schema. How are we going to organize this data? What does a proper schema look like? What's really the infrastructure in which we want to organize this data? So we were mostly focused on parks and campgrounds and so really establishing, first of all, that hierarchy, right? There's a park that has one or many campgrounds. A campground has one or many campsites. What are the amenities that a campground might have like hot showers or running water, like really establishing just that metadata, that structure that we're going to fill in? And then part of why the original hip camp product, despite not being a great business, was a great product, was because that data had not been structured and organized in a unified way across different agencies. And the reality is most people don't have a strong preference, county campground, state campground, federal campground. They're like, I want trees and river and an ocean. So like, who happens to manage the land is not always my first decision-making criteria. And so unifying”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Hopefully, everyone's got their guests ready. You'll never guess the answer. So I've actually had the good fortune of working with the outdoor industry association quite a bit on this.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Campground infrastructure. And so now on hip camp, you can find a yurt with an ocean front view and you've lobster that the host catches for you brought to your door. You can stay in a glamping tent and go on a trail ride and learn all about rodeo culture from the father of the west most winning rodeo family. You can stay on a farm and learn about organic farming and have a farm to table meal and understand, you know, what a big role agriculture can play in fighting climate change. is a much broader and more, I think, relevant set of outdoor experiences and traditional campgrounds. And again, that's really what the internet makes possible. It's the democratization of that experience.”

    2021-04-29 · Invest Like the Best · Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source