
Sourced Adventures – Adventure Travel Startup generating $125K/month - urahara
https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sourced-adventures
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jasonbarone
I worked in the same co-working space as SA back in New York about 2 years ago
and I can say without a doubt that the team behind SA hustled their asses off
day in and day out. SA was the only crew in that space that seemed to work as
much or more than I did, even going so far as to opening a cafe
([https://www.adventurecafe.nyc](https://www.adventurecafe.nyc)) in the tiny
little pop-up space in Lower East Side that businesses were failing in left
and right. Kyle's post here is great, but it doesn't quite touch on the fact
that this team was crushing it all week long to make it happen. Incredibly
nice people as well.

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kdavidson
Hey Jason! Great to hear from you man. You were always hustling your butt off
as well! Haha. I always remember seeing you there around the clock, as we do!

I really appreciate the kind words and thanks for the Adventure Cafe shout
out. It means a lot!

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avitzurel
> So while I was working on the site, which at the time had no traffic, I went
> out to every single OTA (online travel agency) and third-party reseller site
> and said, "Look how many tickets we're selling through just one channel! You
> should get in on this!" And I just set up as many channels as I could find
> to fund the next stage. It's very common for tour operators to have either
> no tech or bad tech, so it wasn't that weird to these channels.

I really like this! Lots of people I talk to think: I will put this on the
internet and people will find me. Hustling to get to your crowd is a great way
to make sure you get consistent traffic. Kudos on this

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dyarosla
I was curious what the 125,000/mo referred to: it's their gross sales on trip
bookings, not their actual final cut. The author doesn't delve into margins
(that said, not trying to downplay the accomplishment in any way).

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mbrameld
What about the part where he says their margins are around 25%?

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inopinatus
He says that's their target, not actual.

I don't know his sector, but in mine, for a maximally automated service, that
would be very high, and leaves exposure to undercutting from similar new
entrants.

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n9com
Why does it say 'Annual Recurring Revenue' on their chart? How is it
'Recurring', it's not like it's subscription based? It's straight up revenue.

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kdavidson
Yeah I'm not sure why it says 'recurring' that's our year over year direct
sales only.

In other words, sales directly through sourcedadventures.com (not counting
revenue through OTA's or third party channels)

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imnotlost
Two pop-overs and a chat window in less than 5 seconds. I guess they really
work?

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avitzurel
From personal experience in consumer-facing travel.

Google made quite a bit of changes to the algorithm and hurt almost every
travel product in favor of it's own products.

I wonder if you were effected by this at all and what did you do to deal with
it?

~~~
kdavidson
This hasn't hurt us in any significant way, at least yet.

Google also gives a lot of credit to how a business is reviewed in travel and
because we have hundreds of 5-star reviews between TripAdvisor, Yelp and
Google+ and many more internal reviews on our site we've only seen our
rankings rise recently. We focus on having the best reviewed product in each
of our categories and it seems Google has rewarded us for that.

It's something we're definitely on the look out for though, absolutely

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stevenj
Question for the Sourced Adventures founder: do you know what happened with
LivingSocial's acquisition of Urban Escapes in October 2010?

[https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/livingsocial-buys-
ur...](https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/livingsocial-buys-urban-
escapes)

~~~
kdavidson
Yes! It was indeed rolled into LivingSocial as an effort to differentiate from
Groupon at the time in the height of the daily deals craze. We were
essentially an in-house tour operator / adventure travel company for LS.

I came on board shortly after the Urban Escapes acquisition as part of the
team that was scaling the UE model for LS in NYC.

Urban Escapes was rebranded as "LivingSocial Adventures"

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whitepoplar
Only tangentially related, but is there an OTA that doesn't go for the hard
sell? E.g. popups galore, notications, spammy email? If so, I will spend every
dollar of my future travel expenditure with that company.

~~~
muchbetterguy
We:
[https://www.muchbetteradventures.com](https://www.muchbetteradventures.com)
try our best to keep the popups to a minimum (just a hellobar up top..) but
then perhaps we're doing things wrong?

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SmellTheGlove
Nice to see someone succeeding in the travel space.

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pawelwentpawel
I really like Sourced Adventures logo design.

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brndnmtthws
Wow, I just visited their website and it's awful. I saw a total of 4 or 5
different popup widgets[1]. What a nightmare.

[1]: [https://i.imgur.com/EMdObEd.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/EMdObEd.jpg)

~~~
devopsproject
Makes $125,000 a month. maybe they know something we don't?

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kerkeslager
Maybe what's good for business isn't always good for the user, and the only
reason anyone thinks capitalism works this way is that it makes some people
rich. :)

