Marcus Richards
Tribd mission is to help solo adventure travellers to connect with like-minded people around the world and find their tribe.
Tell us about yourself?
I’m a solo adventure traveller and a surf enthusiast, by night, and a business professional by day. I have a lot of experience working with data, products and technologies, but no prior experience with mobile apps. Creating Tribd was a whole new and very steep learning curve.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
No different to what I am telling myself now – this is a process and every day is a new learning.
What problem does your business solve?
Tribd helps solo travellers find adventure partners. Around 148 million people are estimated to take solo trips. But many solo travellers, who want independence during travel, don’t want to be alone.
So, we help them to find like-minded travellers with similar travel plans and connect. With Tribd people have flexibility in making own travel plans, but they don’t have to be alone.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
Travels and surfing are my passions and when I’m not working, I’m always planning my next adventure.
In a journey of both surf and adventure travels, in the last ten years or so, I always come back to the question: ‘who will I go with on my next adventure’?
I have a great circle of friends, some of whom I have known for many years, some newly acquired through my travels and surf trips.
However, I often find myself in a position, where it’s difficult to find a travel partner wanting to do the exact same thing, at the exact same time of the year.
Even amongst those of my friends, who are keen adventure travellers themselves, it’s not easy to synchronise our lifestyles, work schedules or travel preferences and make together travel plans possible.
Through my travels and meeting travellers and active sport pursuers like me, I have learned that others also have a problem finding a travel companion.
Regardless how adventurous you are, it’s always good to have a trip buddy to pursue ‘off the beaten track’ destinations.
That’s how the idea of Tribd was born.
What is your magic sauce?
Our unique matching algorithm, combining people’s travel preferences and interests, including any destination on Google maps, which allows to find people with even 100% compatibility of travel plans. We even show our users the travel compatibility score they have with each other.
That and a genuine community of solo adventure travellers. One would not exist without another.
Are you into surfing and want to travel to Siargao between 9 Sep and 9 Oct? We are able to find you a person who has the exact same plans, so you can connect and meet there.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
We want to scale the platform, build an Android version and to become THE platform and the brand for solo adventure travellers worldwide.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Global pandemic, which essentially killed travel industry for over 2 years and almost killed us – a bootstrapped travel focused startup. I knew I just had to wait it out and when travel eventually restarts, people will be hungry for travel again.
Before pandemic 148 million people were estimated to take solo trips each year, so it is a huge market and opportunity. We just had to survive the past years.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We would like for more people to hear about Tribd and try it out for themselves. The nature of social platforms, is that they make sense if there is a scale. More people on the app, means more potential matches, more opportunities to find adventure buddies.
Right now, we have a lot of people going to popular destinations, like Bali, London, Greece. But if we grow the community, even people going to a true off the beaten path destinations, will be able to find someone to travel with.
Tribd is currently available on the App Store and we have just released a new and improved version of the app. You can download it here: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/tribd/id1363878997
