From New Zealand To Silicon Valley: Victoria Ransom’s Wildfire Journey (Part 2)

Sramana: Why did the two of you decide to start an adventure travel company as your first entrepreneurial venture?

Victoria Ransom: When we were in investment banking, we were both looking to learn to surf. We had tried to find a trip where we could do that, and everything we found seemed to be oriented toward college kids. It was a bunch of party-oriented camping trips. We felt there was an opportunity to create trips for young professionals who wanted to learn a specific sport while traveling. You could learn to surf while exploring Morocco, or go snowboarding in New Zealand or Japan.

We established our first trip to New Zealand. Honestly, it was a deal where we took a year off to see if we could get the trip off the ground. If we were able to get that trip off the ground, we would have put someone in to manage it while we went to graduate school, where we could figure out what we really wanted to do with our lives. We ran that first trip, and it was very successful.

We had 30 people on our first trip. Everyone loved it and they asked us to set up another trip, so we established another one in Switzerland. A year later, we created five more trips. Before we knew it, we had created a global network of trips where others were leading the trips and we were in the office doing marketing and client services.

We ran that company for five years before putting a manager in place and going back to business school. One of the important things that happened with Access Trips was we ended up getting enough of a customer base that we needed a technology solution to collect payments, including deposits and remaining balances, and insurance information, and send out travel information. We looked around and could not find anything that we felt would meet our needs, so we built our own software product. We made a lot of mistakes but really enjoyed the process of building software.

It was eye-opening to realize that in order to build a good software product, you don’t need to be a good coder. You need to understand a business process very well and have a good intuition for a clear user experience. My co-founder went to Stanford for his MBA, while I went off to Harvard. We were both looking for the next new challenge. In business school we had a great experience, and we both realized that we did not want to get another job; rather, we wanted to start something else. We decided we wanted to expand our software product into something that could become a platform for small and medium sized businesses in the travel space. We wanted to automate the customer management process.

At the very end of 2007, in my final year of business school, Facebook launched their fan pages for businesses. We thought that would be a great opportunity to market Access Trips because it was the right demographic for us. We created a fan page for Access Trips, and we quickly realized that we had to figure out a way to get people to come and engage with our fan page. We thought about giving away a trip, but the problem is that in order to do that on Facebook, you have to build an application to run a sweepstakes and have people share on Facebook. We felt that if it was a barrier to entry for us that it was a barrier to entry for a lot of other businesses as well. We felt it would be a barrier to entry for SMBs, so we decided to create an application that would enable them to run sweepstakes on Facebook. It was done as a side project, but before I knew it we had companies like Kayak and Zappos using our product. At that point, we realized that it was not just for SMBs.

This segment is part 2 in the series : From New Zealand To Silicon Valley: Victoria Ransom's Wildfire Journey
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