Interview: Gogobot CEO on the Secret to Travel Startup Survival
Photo Credit: Travis Katz, founder and CEO of Gogobot, believes community-building in travel art form, and he learned some of the secrets during a prior stint at MySpace. Gogobot
Skift Take
Travel startups will never emerge from the startup phase if they can't be creative and figure out a way to scale their businesses and get people to use their websites and apps more than a couple of times per year. Sometimes it means community-building or expanding beyond "travel" into local discovery.
Editor's Note: In our Skift Startup Stories series, we document travel startup issues, solutions, and lessons from a variety of angles, hoping to shed light on what separates the winners from the losers. You can read all of the stories in the series here.
Travis Katz, founder and CEO of trip-planning and local discovery site Gogobot, knows something about platforms as he did a stint as general manager, international, of MySpace in Europe in 2006.
You remember MySpace (RIP), right? It was the social networking rage before Facebook, until it wasn't.
But Katz took a lot from his MySpace experience, which found him traveling around Europe for work and fun at a frenetic pace.
That helped Katz come up with the idea for Gogobot, which was founded in 2010 and has raised nearly $40 million in funding.
"So most people will go and travel once or twice a year and I was traveling like 30 times a year, and so I started to have this interesting insight on travel, which was that bo
