Building a marketplace from scratch, with Hipcamp founder Alyssa Ravasio

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So you can move faster, adapt faster, and scale AI with competence. All the power of AI, none of the uncertainty. Learn more at pega.com slash AI. I really had a good understanding of scale and the internet, but then it was combining that with nature and the outdoors. I did not have clarity on. How we were going to make money. How are we going to build a company? When did you know it was working? I remember waking up that morning and opening up our, you know, backend systems. I think we'd gotten like four or five people to sign up at that point. And there were hundreds. And I got to just scroll through and I started crying. I bet. Yeah. Cause you're like, oh, people want this. I would get really angry letters from people. That's the last place that I could still go without six months notice. Oh, they were gatekeeping. They were gatekeeping, but it's also genuine scarcity. The biggest challenge has been like managing my own health and energy. I got shingles at one point, feel very lucky. I went into the ER that day and the doctor took one look at me and said, this is shingles. You're way too young for shingles. Can we talk about our job? What's going on? Cause they knew this was stress-related. Absolutely. With us today is Alyssa Ravasio, who is the founder and CEO of HipCamp, which is a company that's been around for a long time. And she's the founder and CEO of HipCamp. If you are camping is the way to book your spot with, I think, over a half million locations now, millions of trips booked. This is a really interesting scale story. Welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. Thrilled to be here with you. Why this problem? Why was this the problem you wanted to take on? I was really lucky. My family went camping a bunch growing up. My childhood is filled with memories of making mudslides, catching frogs, rekindling the fire in the morning from, like, early little embers that were left over. Like, that's how I think of growing up. And when I started trying to have those experiences more as an adult, trying to book a campsite for myself, I really couldn't believe how broken, how fragmented, and how difficult that process was. You know, at a moment when you can order any food, a car, a hotel with, like, the click of a phone. Like, why is getting outside still feel like we're in the 80s? And the idea was just to make it simple to get outside in hopes that, you know, in hopes that that would get more people outside. You started HipCamp in 2013, is that right? Yes, it's been a little over a decade. So it's post-launch of Airbnb. Yeah. Live Math is right. Was part of it, like, let's just do Airbnb for camping? Or did you have a different vision for what this would be? Yeah, it was a different vision to start. So originally, we were totally focused on public campgrounds. I had a trip I'd planned in particular where I was looking for a campsite on the coast to show my boyfriend how beautiful it was. And when you want to camp on the coast, you want to camp on the coast. In California, that could be a national park, a state park, a forest service park, a county park, maybe even a private park. That's like 15 different websites. Like, the fragmentation was really crazy. This trip in particular, after planning for hours, choosing a campground, I found out once we arrived, we walked up to the campground, everyone had, like, surfboards and wetsuits. And I was like, what's going on? We walked out to the coast, and there was a beautiful surf break. And I love to surf, and I had left my board at home. Because even though I'd done hours of surfing, and I'd done hours of research, no one had mentioned that. Oh, you're so bummed. I was so bummed. So the first version of Hip Camp, which is called California Camping, by the way, was really just about pulling together that fragmented information and creating a space for campers to help each other learn about what's good to know about each campground. And so the first version of the problem was I wanted to put the existing campgrounds in a map. And it actually took a few years until we realized the problem had a much deeper layer. Oh, so did you envision it? Did you envision it as a business at first? Or was it more a coding project to solve a problem for you that might be helpful for others as well? I wanted it to be a business because I didn't want to go get a job. I had worked at a couple of startups before Hip Camp, and I'd learned a ton, but had also learned as part of that time that I was really wanting to run my own company and kind of be my own boss. Can we click in on the couple of jobs that you had? What did you learn there that said to you, this is not for me, I'm going to go start my own thing? The biggest thing I learned is that when I figure something out, it's really hard to not act on that. I found myself in situations where I had to do something that I didn't think was the right thing to do. And that killed my soul. I couldn't do it. It was just like, this is not what I want to put energy into. This isn't how I would approach the market. Things like that, that just really led me to decide, you know, even though at the time I was, you know, 23, like, it's time to start a company. It's time to get to do things in the way that I think will be best and feel, I guess, most exciting to me. I've always liked starting things and leading teams, so my first business cards for my first company, I got my dad to print when I was, I think, 10. Waller, walking around. Yeah, it was Spiral Films Production. We made movies. My sisters were my employees. I paid them in mac and cheese. Awesome. Yeah, because I was the only one who could use a stove. Right, well, you know, there you go. That's leverage. I had a resource locked down. I needed the right idea. I knew I didn't want to just go start something to start something and see if I could make some money, right? For me, it was about solving a problem that I thought was, was worth solving, right? And was worth the years and the energy that it would take to solve that. I really had a good understanding of scale and the internet and how this new technology can totally change and will totally change how the world works. But then it was combining that with nature and the outdoors and the passion I have for getting people to basically, you know, reconnect with the biosphere and nature. It was like those two things together that that was worth going all in on. How did you actually get HipCamp off the ground, both from a, how were you financing it? And how did you get a website or an app in consumers' hands? Yeah, so originally I had to learn how to code. And I had this idea and I tried to start a couple other startups, maybe like in between different moments at different parts of my life. And that had always required, like the big blocker was finding a software engineer who wanted to build this. And I found that it was just time to be able to do that on my own. And so I went to DevBootCamp, which had just started at the time. Right, this is before vibe coding. Well, gosh. Yeah. Yes. Yes. I don't regret learning to code, but man, things would have been a lot faster if I'd had Codex. That would have been great, but I didn't. So I learned how to code and I ended up enlisting my sisters again, my first employee. And a couple of friends and actually, you know, building this very early version of the site that actually got some traffic and got people using it early on. And we got traction. We got, I think we were getting close to having probably one of the biggest search engines for camping. How did you find those customers earlier? How did they find you? A little of everything. I mean, this was an era where I was going to like every meetup I could. I would just walk around with my laptop, handing out stickers, big sticker fan. I brought stickers. And so I would just ask people, do you like to camp? And if they made the mistake of saying yes, I was like, well, let me show you this and open the laptop. And oh, you see that place to put your email and put that in there. Oh, good. It's working. Big shout out to REI on Brandon. They let me, they let me sit at a little card table I'd bring and set up in front of their front door. So I did a lot of that. Really hand-to-hand marketing. Yeah. Because it wasn't even, it was marketing. It was also feedback, right? It was also this idea of we're going to build this product in collaboration with community. I'm going to get input and understand what they're looking for, what I have that they love, what I don't have yet. And actually kind of like our, one of our big break moments was a digital version of that where I got like a customer support email where someone was suggesting we had a filter for them. And we were working on that. And I was like, great. I wrote back right away. I was like, great. Yes. Thank you for your feedback. We're working on that. I'll let you know when we ship it. And then suddenly I started getting traffic notifications from Google. It was like your traffic spike. And it turned out the person I had emailed back had a big Twitter following. Wow. And they liked my response and they had tweeted out, you know, go check out HipCamp. We actually got in that first big, you know, traffic burst. And I got a bunch of like emails and one of them was from Dave Morin who ended up investing a quarter million dollars later that month. But like, it was kind of crazy, right? That like a customer support email led to a tweet, led to, you know, our first funding round. And yeah, Dave's been a great champion and partner ever since. Well, I love that story about the customer feedback and your response because one, it goes to clearly a commitment to serving your community. But two, if you treat every customer, every community member like a VIP, you just never know. Totally. Zeus is law, right? Right. Okay. So you're getting traction. You're going, you're building a. a real following, a real community, but you're at this point really sort of a guide and a search engine. You're not a marketplace. Right. What happens? Crisis. So never let a good one go to waste. No, I mean, and it was, it was existential at the time. So our mission from our origin has been get more people outside. And we really mean the more, right? We want people to connect with nature and get out there more often. And we had this great, you know, search engine and directory and we're getting lots of cool reviews. But what was happening was every time I would find a campground that wasn't fully booked and I would put in an email or God forbid, put it on the homepage. Why? Like I remember one email I got where someone was explaining, you know, I need to be able to get outside on the weekend. If I've had a hard week, this is the last place I can do that. Please don't ruin it. Wow. I was like, Oh my gosh, how are we going to, how are we going to make our mission happen? If the existing infrastructure in most cases, many cases is already at capacity. I'll always remember this. I went, um, it was an Italian restaurant in North beach with paper table cloths, which are amazing. If you're having a really hard time, go somewhere with paper table cloths, especially North beach. Yeah. It's like a big whiteboard at your table. And I wrote, I started writing down potential business models. Now keep in mind, we've raised money at this point. Bryce Roberts from OATV had led a seed round. Dave Morin had invested. I had great investors and I did not have clarity on how we were going to make money. What was that going to be? And especially when all these people were so upset, if we were marketing anything that was, wasn't booked. And so we literally wrote down everything from advertising to like a cool gear delivery to private land. Private land was like a very niche idea. I'd gotten a couple emails from landowners. Who had suggested it. I hadn't really been to much private land on my own. So it's kind of dismissive of it. And I ran an exercise where I said, if this business model was wildly successful 10 years from now, 20 years from now, what impact have we had? And it was only through that lens that private land just jumped off the map because we would have created a whole new way to get outside, changed outdoor recreation, solved the root of the problem, right? The root of the problem was there's not enough great campsites. There's not enough supply. And in doing so created this amazing model that could scale recreation for conservation. And so it was really through that lens that we chose private land. But it was a lot of question marks at the time. It wasn't a sure thing at all. Well, I love this for so many reasons, not least which being you had real customer feedback, which I think for a lot of entrepreneurs have been exasperating. It's like, I'm trying to do good. I'm trying to do a service here. I'm really what you realized was there was a supply demand problem. There was a different way to attack it. Can we just go back to this North Beach Italian restaurant? Is it you alone? Are you there with your team? I was there with my husband. With your husband? Yeah. Was it intentionally we're going to go here and we're going to work on this or was it yes? We're going to solve the problem tonight. Okay. Gotcha. A lot of intention. With or without wine, definitely with red sauce. Definitely with wine too. Yeah. And so as you're using the paper on as your whiteboard and you list out private land, was that the aha moment or was that the start of the unlock? It was a start because a lot of business models, you ultimately end up helping people trade money for time. Yeah. Right. They're models of convenience. That wasn't super compelling to me. The aha moment was realizing this would change the way the world works for the better. This would solve this problem I've been obsessed with. It would solve the root cause. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. team spends more time finding data than using it, that's when you need the Intuit ERP. Intuit Enterprise Suite is the AI-native ERP solution that's powerful, painless, and proven, built for businesses scaling fast without the complexity that usually comes with it. From the makers of QuickBooks, learn more at intuit.com slash ERP. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's going to be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future that is human-centered? I'm Rana El-Khayoubi, and on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future, and we take you behind the scenes. The scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find Pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. I imagine being on your board or an investor in your company and asking the question, what happens if Airbnb wakes up tomorrow and says they're going to do the same thing? Yeah, every time we raise money, that is a big question. What I have said to that in the past is that when you want to get outside, that's such a different mindset than when you're looking for a good alternative to a hotel or a house to rent. It's just a different use case and a different brand. And I think while there's some overlap in customers, it really is just a different way for people to be thinking about what they're looking to make happen in the world. And so it could, of course, not to tempt anyone here, they could maybe, but I think it would be very difficult and a very hard thing that would require different branding, different setup, different product, all of that. Well, and also you're at a scale now where the build by partner analysis for Airbnb would be very different than it was then. Yeah, I mean, scale is the ultimate moat for a marketplace right like network effects are amazing and it's just it's so fun to build a business that i couldn't imagine feeling this level of enthusiasm for the business we're building if i didn't understand and see every day how every unit of supply we add makes it better for every camper and every camper we add makes it better for every host like that that to me that scale that network effect is what you know that's what's so exciting about the business model when did you know it was working we partnered with a really large um i think it was like a regenerative organic farmers association and we had them email their their newsletter and say hey if you want to host camping sign up we didn't know do people want to do this do people not want to do this i remember waking up that morning where they'd sent out the newsletter that morning and opening up our you know back end systems i think we'd gotten like four or five people to sign up at that point and there were hundreds and i got to just scroll through and i started crying i bet yeah you because you're like oh people want this and my inbox was full of notes from people who were like we've been talking about doing this for years we've got the perfect i remember like a strawberry farm on an island and they were like but we couldn't afford the insurance but we couldn't figure out how to market it we couldn't figure out how to reach people and i was like oh this is going to work when i knew we had demand that's never been the problem now we have supply what incredible signal you situate us where in the journey you are probably 2017 or so okay yeah what are some of the biggest challenges you've had to tackle that you didn't foresee that night and you're north beach italian restaurant i think helping people think through infrastructure and the right thing is important um probably regulations are another one are you familiar with ab518 i mean i am because i prepped for our conversation okay so um just last year california passed a pretty amazing legislation that creates a new regulatory framework counties can opt into that allows people who have you know bigger parcels mostly targeting farmers ranchers land trust things like that to have up to nine campsites without needing to get the really onerous um permit that is required for like an rv park before there wasn't like a separate lane for these lower impact type of campsites um that has totally changed the game so it's been amazing to see the coalition around this right it's everyone from you know the farm bureau uh to the nature conservancy right like when's the last time like all the farmers and all the farmers and all the farmers came together to do something outdoor rec is such a powerful economic engine like outdoor recreation means trails it means boat ramps that's not just going to bring in visitors that's great for the people who live there as well and so that's really created i think a groundswell of support around you know regulations to better support more more outdoor recreation so what's been the biggest challenge since you incorporated private land and hip and hip camp really took off i think for me personally the the biggest challenge has been like managing the land in a way that it's not just for us but for the people who live there and so i think it's a really big challenge and i think it's a really big challenge and i think it's a really big challenge and i believe so much in what we're doing that it can get really easy and especially you know maybe a few years ago um to start talking yourself into making sacrifices that don't make sense sacrifice sleep sacrifice a workout sacrifice a healthy dinner right like these kind of little things that each one on their own feels like justified in the moment but over the course of a few years really starts to pile up um i got shingles at one point and i got a lot of shingles i feel very lucky i went into the er that day and the doctor took one look at me and said this is shingles you're way too young for shingles can we talk about our job what's going on because they knew this was stress related absolutely yeah absolutely and so i think learning to build you know the right systems the right habits there's no glory in like becoming unhealthy in pursuit of this mission so i'd say the real unlock is more knowing that like your your body and mind are worth taking care of and that if you're really in solving a problem and building a scaled organization that's going to help shape culture for decades you got to take care of yourself and like you are worth taking care of and so so many times i'll talk to early stage founders who are just really struggling and they're exhausted it's like okay let's try to take care of that first because the second you're tired you lose your creativity you lose your problem solving you come up to a challenge and instead of getting curious about how to get around it it feels like a you know a drama stress you know it's the end um and so i yeah that's actually probably been the hardest the hardest part of all this for me how big's the company now uh close to 100 100 people yeah we're now the largest search engine for public land we're the largest search engine and booking engine for commercial campgrounds which we haven't gotten into yet but one of the benefits of scaling this company through private land is now all the existing campgrounds also can benefit they can join and i think we're sending more bookings now to commercial campgrounds in the u.s than any other platform by nearly an order of magnitude um and then of course we're the largest search and booking engine for private land which is a category um we essentially created and have really been able to scale and so it's really those three pillars together that have um created the hip camp of today this is the company remote hybrid or in person so we're mostly work from home but we do a lot of in-person works i'm happy to talk about that because that was a whole journey how do you how do you do in person lots of ways we do we have a space in san francisco we we go to sometimes but then we do a lot of um like on sites where we bring everyone together not every one but like the right group of people so i'm working with people in person probably like almost every week every other week and then we do bigger company camping trips and camp out so you do on-site say campsites sometimes yes and what do those look like um generally it's like we've identified a really important problem there's just certain problems i think are really hard to solve on zoom and when you feel that you just like fly everybody in and you're like we're solving this we're not leaving until we do it's one thing to bring everyone into an office it's another thing to bring everyone to mendocino magic or another one of the the campsites with which you work what drives you to bring people out into nature to to one of your your partners and and set up on the land and work there i think for us being at a hip camp it means you get to see the product in action and it's just deeply inspiring like it's so much more meaningful if we're talking about how do we create more great campsites our number one objective has been for a long time if we actually get to go walk the land so recently we had an on-site out in stinson we got to go walk around slide ranch which is a beautiful hip camp site a non-profit that has a mission to get more kids rooted in nature and they have great campsites and they use that revenue to fund scholarships we got to walk around hear from the host about those scholarships about the direct impact our work is having on helping her organization go from being in a pretty serious deficit to being in the black and then we got to walk through the campsite and see the people who were like setting up their tents and we're gonna camp on the edge of the pacific ocean for the night and seeing people having these moments of exhale and peace and being like that's what all of our hard work is making us do and we're going to camp on the edge of the pacific ocean for the night and seeing people having these moments of exhale and peace and making possible when we talk about having our core company north star is nights outside right that's our core kpi we're always tracking and working towards and when you get to the millions it can start to feel abstract and then you know getting to walk by a campsite and see i did this just last night i saw a mom with her son setting up and i was like that's one they're gonna have a magical night he's gonna remember that forever it was an eclipse the sun was setting into the ocean it was great that's one yeah that's one night outside and i think kind of keeping that into the the human reality of what we're doing is is is really motivating and part of why we like to as often as we can meet at a hip camp and see that in real life so what's the insight for other business leaders who don't have campsites in the core of their business for how to make an off-site or an on-site um how to tie it directly to the mission of the company and make it more impactful i think a couple things one just never undervaluing in person time our company is a work from anywhere so for the most part people get to be wherever they want but we're very quick to pull the lever and say we need an on-site we're gonna all get together in person maybe it's in san francisco maybe it's at a hip camp maybe it's somewhere else but being really quick to just get everyone together there are certain problems you that are just hard to solve through zoom so that's one thing and then from the you know specifically camping angle for us that's our product that's our mission that's what we're building i think anytime you can bring your team to see firsthand and ideally experience firsthand what you're building how that impacts you people in the real world that's a source of motivation that's a source of energy and also a lot of intelligence right when you get to see it and feel it you can see how to make it better as well and so i think anything you can do to bring your team close to your customer that's probably the core insight that we're tapping into there your passion just comes like right off of you i mean it just fills the room and it's just a great reminder of of what happens when you take on something that you really care about that where where you are so deeply tied to the mission it's we don't always get to sit with founders who are this uh excited about what they're trying to solve i'm really excited i'm very excited and there's lots of layers to that too right like i just love technology i just i find it endlessly fascinating it's like what do you love about it i love that it's changing how culture works i love that it's changing how people live their lives because that's an opportunity to improve things if it's such a force for change you know it's just fun and then i love nature right i want people to get out of their comfort zones to get outside the science around getting outside is completely clear now that it's so good for your health i want rural communities and economies to be thriving and i want us to protect and conserve all of the open land we have left and so this is a model that allows me to do all those things at the same time you know that there's nothing i'd rather be doing i think of sometimes like coyote trickster energy like how can we use technology to get people off of technology like that's what we're doing you have these moments in the evolution hip camp where they're inflection points right i have to imagine that much like for mckenzie at mendocino magic there have been moments along the way where you have seen really concretely the financial impact that you're having on the landowners who are opening up their homes, their properties, and the positive effect that that's had. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, there's actually a very specific moment I can remember where that happened very concretely. It was super early on, probably our first few months of sending bookings to private landowners. And we were moving bookings and I was really, it kind of felt like a scientist. I was like, is this going to work? It looks like it's going to work. And I reached out to one of our new hosts. It's a ranch up in Bodega, Northern California, and they were doing great. I was like, I'm going to go meet them. I want to go say hi, walk around the land. And I drive up to this ranch. It's called Salmon Creek Ranch. It's incredible. It's 600 acres of redwoods and a creek, just incredible, incredible stewards. And I pull up and Leslie, the landowner is waiting for me and she's walking up to me and she has this piece of paper. And I'm like, oh no, it's a list of demands. It's a list of demands. And I'm like, oh no, it's a list of complaints. It's everything we've done wrong. It's all the problems with the software, all the features we haven't built. So I'm sitting there. I'm like, hi, great to meet you. Feedback is a gift. I mean, feedback's a piece. Yeah, feedback's a gift. What's with the paper? And she goes, I want you to have this. And she hands it to me. She said, this is a letter from a financial buyer who sent us this letter trying to buy our land. And we get this letter all the time. They put it on nice paper. It's thick. And it's essentially says, we'd love to buy your land. We're going to develop it. You'd get a lot of money. Why are you trying so hard selling duck eggs? Why don't you just sell to us now? She said, I hate these letters. I hate them. This would be destroying everything we've dedicated. Our goal here is to leave this land better than we found it. This would be a failure. She said, but I've been having to hold on to them and put them in a drawer just in case, because some months we're not sure exactly how it's going to work out. And I'm giving you this letter because HipCamp makes it junk mail now. I know I don't need to call them back. I know I don't even need to save it. You can take it. Take it back with you. I don't need it. Because the income we're getting from camping, that's changed everything for us. And it's been amazing to hear that story again and again. I had another landowner who told me camping's changed this piece of land from a liability I was nervous to hand down to my son into an asset. Where does that Salmon Creek Ranch letter sit right now? Behind my desk. Oh, great. Yeah. I look at it every day. What a beautiful reminder of the impact you're making. Yeah. And how important it is to keep scaling it out too. Alyssa, I noticed that you have some tattoos on your fingers. I do. Can you tell us about them, please? Yeah. So I have, these are the final words from the absolute last Whole Earth catalog. Are you familiar? I am familiar. Yeah. So this is stay hungry, stay foolish. And the, I guess, like kind of spirit of these words and why I got them, I got them actually after leaving my first job. And even though there was so much about that job that was so hard for me, deciding to leave, seeing what else was out there in the world. Feeling that like rush of potential and creativity again, starting to have ideas for companies I could start on my own. That was what these words were meant to remind me of. And so I put them on my hand. So whenever I'm typing, I have to see them. It's kind of like never settle, you know? And when you see those tattoos right now, what, what do they make you feel or make you think? Proud. Yeah. Proud that I'm, I'm, I'm doing, you know, what I wanted to do. I'm taking the most powerful technologies and tools we have available to us. And, and harnessing them for the impact I want to have. And, um, with a lot of belief that with a great team, like we can do that, we can have that impact. Well, I'm so proud that we get to have you on Masters of Scale, telling the story and using technology really to make people's lives better on both sides of your marketplace and, um, give people the opportunity to use technology, to put technology away, connect with each other, connect with nature and, um, build better lives and a better country. Um, it's wonderful having you on Masters of Scale. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to Alyssa Ravasio for joining us. Alyssa is a stunning example of what's possible when you are hell bent on solving a real world problem as an amazing entrepreneur. I love how she's been able to prioritize the big ideas. I mean, the really big ideas, such as conserving nature and supporting rural communities alongside her goal for every single camper, which is very simply and quite beautifully more amazing nights outside. I'm Jeff Bronson. Thank you for listening. Hey listeners, Bob here. 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