Singapore startup 3PlayGrounds makes group travel more ‘social’, acquired 20K users without marketing spend
The marketplace platform was founded on the idea that there has to be a better way to organise group tours for off-the-beaten-path destinations
These days there is no lack of travel platforms or marketplaces that offer niche tour packages for travellers seeking adventure in both popular destinations as well as off-the-beaten-track areas.
The emergence of these small businesses have helped to democratise the travel industry: individuals can take on side gigs as tour guides and travellers have access to wider travel experiences — and sometimes without having to pay a premium (which is usually the case when booking with traditional tour companies).
Well, now there is a new one in Singapore. And it’s called 3PlayGrounds. The difference between this and the numerous other players out there — such as Airbnb Experiences — is that 3PlayGrounds allows for “deeply social” travel experiences, Co-founder Britta Hummel, says in an interview with e27.
This means that travellers who book with 3PlayGrounds can potentially form long-lasting relationships with their companions. Check out our interview with Hummel to find out what she really means.
Here is the edited excerpt:
Could you tell me more about your own background? Were you an entrepreneur before starting 3Playgrounds?
I was a startup person in Silicon Valley. The first startup I joined, Canesta, got acquired by Microsoft. I got to join the Microsoft HoloLens team, but because I had loved working at the startup so badly, I went on to become a founding engineer at a new startup, Aquifi, and built and led the engineering team.
I always had this itch to start a C2C marketplace (Aquifi is B2B), so after 3.5 years and a big product release I left Aquifi to start my own thing.
Shortly afterwards, I ran into 3PlayGrounds’ future Co-founder Chong Lee Ling, who previously worked at CitiBank’s Infrastructure department for 17 years, at a networking event here in Singapore, and heard her idea and went “oh shit this is going to be amazing”.
Fast forward a few weeks later, I became the company’s second Co-founder (the 3rd partner prefers to stay anonymous). That was in January 2016.
Tell me more about the personal pain points you faced that led you to start 3Playgrounds.
Ling had always been an adventure traveller since young. But it had been hard for her to find friends to travel with. Some lacked time or interest in off-the-beaten-path travel –- preferring shopping or food instead. And of those who did, no one wanted to organize. And so out of necessity eventually she stepped up and started to organize these trips herself.
First for friends, and later on — as details of her trips grew through word-of-mouth — for more and more distant acquaintances. Eventually, she and our 3rd partner posted a trip on social networking site meetup.com. And then things exploded. Over 10,000 people joined their group in less than a year.
All of them had the same pain points as Ling, and asked for advice. To keep up with demand, we (I had joined by then) had to move out of meetup and build our own platform, which eventually became 3PlayGrounds.
Our vision with 3PlayGrounds is two-fold: One, to help travellers travel socially, with like-minded friends. And two, more importantly: We want to help what we call ‘Travelpreneurs’ – people that love to show like-minded buddies around but are held back because of a myriad of problems:
How do I find customers?
How do I comply with the law (in Singapore that’s the SG Tourism Board)?
How do I price my trip?
How do I build a high traffic website (i.e. do SEO)?
How do I manage a group safely?
3PlayGrounds mission is to take all those hassles away, so that travelpreneurs can focus on doing what they love – travel with friends-to-be, while making some cash on the side.
How did you grow the platform initially?
Many of our early adopters were using on meetup.com to find travel companions. So we had our development team develop a way of automatically re-posting each 3PlayGrounds trip on several meetup groups. This was great because meetup already had a user base of 8 million worldwide and great SEO.
Next, users who RSVPed were then directed back to 3PlayGrounds for trip preparation, group chat, payments, etc. This way, every meetup user was converted into a 3PlayGrounds user, seeding the demand side of their marketplace.
Ling also knows a lot of really off-the-beaten-track places in Singapore, which not even locals will know, and she has always loved showing people around these places. So she decided to post her trips on 3PlayGrounds for free.
And everybody loves free stuff. Together with the above meetup growth hack, RSVPs for these trips skyrocketed with more than 100 RSVPs per trip.
How do you curate the trips on the platform — and ensure they are safe, reliable and that travellers will be satisfied with them?
Our first safety pillar is “KYC” or “know your customer”: We meet all of our hosts personally. Some hosts we even travel with ourselves first (I just came back from testing our new standup paddle boarding organiser).
We have an ongoing WhatsApp group with every host where we provide advice and
answer questions. As we scale, we are working on automating the background checks ala Airbnb.
The second safety pillar is our review system: Every trip participant can rate their organiser. And similar to Uber, if an organizer’s rating is below expectation, we need to temporarily or permanently suspend the account.
Our third safety pillar is our payment system: We act as an escrow agent between our travellers and the travelpreneur. We will hold on to the funds until the trip is confirmed. This way we can guarantee a full refund if you as a traveller decide you do not want to go.
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On Curation:
Trips on the platform are curated by the hosts. We feel that a passion for a place that you want to go makes for the most memorable trips.
So passion is something that we look for when we interview new organizers, as well as a high EQ with the ability to manage a group, communicate well (both in person and on WhatsApp), and have a good common sense when it comes to safety.
Prior experience is not required.
Tell me about your other monetisation features.
Primary monetisation is via the commission model. Future additional streams will be via affiliate marketing – say our hosts books a flight or travel insurance or hotel for their group via us. We can both offer a discount to our hosts, as well as earn a small commission per each such referral.
How much of a cut do u get from the host?
12 per cent, however, the net margin is lower as a portion goes into customer service, offering discounts, marketing, and hosting. Every cent made goes into website development. Despite being full-timers we don’t pay ourselves salary
since over 2 years now and live off our savings from past jobs.
There are already a few platforms that allow ordinary folks to host trips such as Airbnb Experiences and BeMyGuest. So how does 3PlayGrounds stand out?
Why do you book an Airbnb, a home or an experience You do it for the experience, not to make friends. By consequence, how likely are you to make ‘friends for life’ on an Airbnb tour? Very low. Don’t get me wrong – Airbnb’s experiences is a fantastic product, but they cater to a different travel segment, which is personalised experiential travel but not deeply social travel.
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Example: Our travellers went together on a 12-day tour to the Canadian Rockies in 2016, and today, over 1.5 years later, they are still on a WhatsApp group together, meet for a dinner every once in a while, and go other trips together.
These stories are not the exception but the rule for our trips.
How much revenue have 3Playgrounds earned?
Around US$200,000 in total.
How big is your team?
We are three founders, 1 advisor, one UI/UX full-timer, 2 freelance devs in Ho Chi Minh City, and part-time accountant.
What other new feature are in the pipeline?
In terms of business goals, scaling up the company is next: We want to have a firm presence in several countries in Southeast Asia in the next three years. In terms of website features, internationalising the website is next.
Second, we want to make event creation quick and simple. Carousell used to have a metric — to post an event within 30 seconds. And they aligned all their development around that.
For us it’s pretty much the same thing for event curation: Right now, curating a trip can take a month – finding a destination that the market wants, finding operators, finding itinerary, finding competitive pricing, finding a way to write up the trip that sells, marketing the trip to customers. Our vision is to take that number down to just a few days.
To lower the barrier to entry for new travelpreneurs, we are also working to offer Coursera courses to for how to conduct a group trip, ranging from basic safety to how to manage group dynamics.
Are you seeking VC funding or currently in the midst of raising money from investors?
Yup. We deliberately stayed bootstrapped for as long as we could, and wait with raising until we had:
We think we are at that point now and are raising a seed round this year.
How many trips are available on the platform? In which markets are you present in?
We have offered 183 outbound trips to 35 countries on the website (more if you count our beginnings on meetup.com).
Customer-wise, we have used Singapore as our test market. In 2018 will be an exciting year as we will start to scale the company internationally. We want to establish a firm presence in several countries in Southeast Asia in the next 3 years.
How many travellers have taken trips on the platform?
Around 7000 have RSVPed, about 50 per cent typically end up going.
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Image Credit: 3PlayGrounds
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