TripAdvisor

“We already work with self book. They power all the hotel bookings natively done on perplexity. We work at TripAdvisor to surface all the reviews of hotels and Different, you know, places. We have, like, collaborations for the maps. We work with Yelp. We also, …”

“There's so many tools out there like Zapier, Claude, Webflow, Appify that we'll go through today. That actually can help you build very, very sophisticated SEO rich platforms, websites that really, and I'll show you some evidence, can help you compete with som…”

“This is like a restaurant called Dishoom, the paneer tikka, for example, we're ranking number one on Google for this right now. You could take, so this is literally the first organic results. It's not sponsored at anything. If someone types in this menu item w…”

“Like Trip Advisors marketing budget is like seven hundred million dollars a year.”

“TripAdvisor ranks very highly on Google and Expedia ranks very highly. All of this like conglomerate monopoly of travel sites that have been around since our, you know, parents were our age traveling tend to get the most traffic. So what does that do? For trav…”

“It would have been great if we'd held on to Viator for just a few more years, tossed another twenty million dollars into the bucket, and turned it into a billion dollar exit.”

“They'll do, I think, over four billion dollars in gross revenue in 2024.”

“TripAdvisor is good. It's not that good. There's still gaps there at the local level,”

“And then there's other ones with 1010 of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of pages, which are either user generated content. Like TripAdvisor and Pinterest and others, or marketplaces like Thumb Attack and other types of websites like that. Those are…”

“Oftentimes when you talk about strategy in words alone, everyone takes away a different interpretation of that strategy. Whereas when you actually can show people wireframes of what the product will look like when that strategy Is implemented. It creates much …”

“The product teams were constantly optimizing for what's going to drive bookings in the moment. And so the thing that drives bookings from a visit to Google naturally moves a person down a transaction path and gets them to the booking and doesn't have them stop…”

“And so I did an analysis where I looked at every company and which companies had repeated success outside of the United States. So eBay, TripAdvisor, a bunch of other sites. And there were clear patterns that TripAdvisor consistently outperformed over and over…”

“So, we could not get any sales for the first, like, nine months of trying.”

“That first revenue check, dot, dot, dot, was 500 dollars.”

“And we sold our very first, you know, real revenue client, 20,000 clicks for 10,000 dollars in the month of December, 2001.”

“March marked our first month of profitability. Since we didn't know how long it would take to turn things around, if we could turn things around, we had cut back on everything non-essential, and so our burn rate was about 70, and March we made it a profitable …”

“The first thing you do is you thank them. The second thing you do is you thank them profusely. And then the third thing you do is you let them know how much other travelers really appreciate their comments. And all of that's just like, it's the dopamine. It's …”

“I think we closed 2003 with over twenty million in annual revenue.”

“And the faster we could get to critical mass of enough reviews everywhere, the harder it was going to be for anyone else to come in and offer reviews as a major service.”

“Financially, it was a crazy bad decision. But given everything I knew at the time with the risks you outlined before, the fact that it was kind of a life-changing experience for everyone at the company was absolutely the right decision.”

“Expedia was our biggest client at the time. Expedia was owned by IAC.”

“We were moved from IAC into the public company Expedia when that was formed about a year later. And again, we were division within Expedia and to their infinite credit, they let us continue to operate on our own, you know, even though we were selling our leads…”

“We see these review places offering to write fake reviews on Google and some other sites. And then they say, except TripAdvisor. Cause like, yeah, if like, if they try, we catch them, we shut them down.”

“The thing that I craved personally the most was the level of impact that the company had, and like four hundred million unique users a month, yeah, with a lot of duplication, you're still counting of impacting the lives, the vacations of A couple of billion p…”

“I want to do it again. I want to not travel not in software tools. But I figure I have one more startup left in me. And as I turn. As I had turned 59 years old, I look around and say, okay, better get moving. And so I am just open for another adventure that ca…”

“If you are going to rely on search engine optimization to grow you're going to have to Be as good as a Pinterest or a TripAdvisor. Eventually. Not right away, but eventually. Because, ah, it's so competitive to win in this, like, large world of SEO.”

“We work with Yelp and TripAdvisor and there's literally like 400 different partners cause it goes into all the different long tail stuff.”

“It seems to me to the extent that Google says, well, we're going to deliver this service directly with native content, with Google native content, versus bringing it from an ecosystem of outside providers, they're losing touch with one of their key strategic a…”

“Nacho Gonzalez that that is a pretty famous co-founder founder here in Barcelona. He's, he had three exits. I, including one to TripAdvisor.”

“You know, and we typically see a 500% increase in TripAdvisor reviews. We see six, 700% in CRM record generation.”