“When you travel, you either create or get created.”
Since ages, people have admired the nature for its beauty and pureness. Some of us even bear an unquenchable thirst that could only be fed by climbing a mountain top, or diving deep in the ocean. Every travel experience awards you with a Unique Story. A story no one has ever heard before, no one else has lived before.
Each travel destination makes us a story teller, and we start finding ways to share this never-seen, never-heard experience with our friends or to those who share similar interests. Over the years, we have witnessed the change in the way travel experiences are being shared—from writing a blog to sharing a few selected captures on social media for instant likes and gratification. We believe that this sudden migration has led to a gap in the market, a need to capture and share travel experiences differently.
While the social media limits your travel tales to a few pictures and words, we start to feel a sudden need of a solution that allows us to tell a story of our entire experience by further giving us the opportunity to inspire others with our stories and reminisce our journeys.
Being travel passionate themselves, Monish Shah and Malhar Gala decided to come up with a solution and as soon as we heard about these Super Traveler Entrepreneurs we knocked their doors as hard as we could.
“We believe that everybody has a story to tell; this belief led to months of ideation and hard work to create a solution for that traveler—THE STORY TELLER. Persistent efforts were made to develop the nearly perfect platform to capture an individual’s travels and build a community of like-minded storytellers to inspire each other. Hence, going back to the drawing board led to creating that optimal solution that is now TraveLibro—a social network, which captures your entire Travel Story.”- Monish, co-founder Travelibro.
Wait…What? A social media platform exclusively for travelers?
Yes, TraveLibro is an app, which gives you the opportunity to tell your stories differently, in brief or in detail; an app, which allows you to influence others and inspire their wanderlust; an app, which is a perfect snapshot of your personality, your travels, your experiences, and your stories. Every aspect of a trip can be documented in a revolutionary new form. It gives blogging a fun twist by creating a beautiful timeline of your travel stories with photos, videos, rating and reviewing of your check-ins and thoughts.
Additionally, TraveLibro helps you discover the stories of other popular travelers to ensure your planning is based on real life experiences as opposed to blogs or itineraries.
Lastly, TraveLibro is one of the only platforms in the world for Travel Agents, Local Guides and Tour Operators to connect with a global audience of travelers. Partners can display their tours, packages and itineraries to generate leads from its audience. These offerings can be easily found by the users either when they are planning a trip or when they are capturing a live trip on-the- go. TraveLibro gives each partner the opportunity to display their offering and then close the deal bilaterally.
The Birth
The seed for TraveLibro was born when Monish, co-founder, was unable to get any real suggestions from friends or family regarding holiday destinations while planning his honeymoon. He was amazed as to how little his friends remembered of their holidays. After spending countless hours on Tripadvisor and multiple blog sites he was none the wiser and even more confused. His frustration lead to a realisation: Amnesia is not as uncommon as we think. While the idea was planted in his brain, it blossomed only in 2014 when Malhar (2nd co-founder) and he were on a holiday in London. What if they could create a platform where co-travellers could capture their journeys live and record activities to a shared timeline? Brainstorming further led to three words: ‘Capture, Inspire and Relieve’. This conversation coupled with Monish’s experience during his honeymoon gave birth to an idea, a platform for users to be able to capture their unique travel stories, relive memories forever and inspire friends and family with their travels.
Woah!! How Did You Guys Do It?
TraveLibro is bootstrapped by its Founders who started the company in December 2014. Initially a beta website was launched in August 2015 followed by a Beta app in December 2015. The beta version of the app was to test how users reacted to the portal and the idea. Since then TraveLibro has hired key tech, design and marketing resources to go back to the drawing board and reinvent TraveLibro, the product that it is today. Crucial inputs with regards to UI, UX and functionality were considered and adopted to make the product high on usability and a thorough value add to users capturing their experiences through the app.
TraveLibro is now live and available for download on the app store and play store.
It is ideal for Frequent Travelers, Backpackers, Overlanders, Solo Travelers, Couple Travelers, Travel Bloggers, Travel Photographers, Travel Enthusiasts, Travel Agents, Tour Operators and Local Guides or anybody who loves to travel and capture their experiences can be a potential user of TraveLibro.
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TraveLibro is a revolutionary new app that allows you to capture your travel stories live on the go to relive a lifetime of memories. You can record all your expeditions by simply clicking on the two tabs, Local Life and Travel Life While Local Life records activities in your home city, Travel Life is reserved for your past and present journeys.
The portal is also available on the desktop, where you can browse through specially curated must-dos and over 1,500 unique itineraries created by in-house editors as well as hotel bookings and listings of travel agents. Additionally, TraveLibro helps you discover the stories of other popular travelers to ensure your planning is based on real life experiences as opposed to blogs or itineraries.
Working with TraveLibro is so much fun! Yay!!
Though we still have an office where we operate out of, the working culture is not like any other mainstream organization says the company employees. What we mean by that is the office ambiance, the dress code, the mode of communication and everything else is anything but official. Yes, we do maintain deadlines and targets when it comes to work at hand, but since the staff are young and with a new-age frame of mind, we do tend to maintain a certain degree of flexibility.
We have regular facilities for the team like a working pantry, flexibility to take lunch and tea breaks, holidays, etc. We also celebrate each team member’s birthday, festivals and go out for team lunches as and when time permits.
Well we all have faced similar problems during the start of a venture! *Sympathetic Headshake*
The biggest challenge we faced was during the beta stage when we did not have an in-house tech team. We had hired a few outsourced agencies to help us with tech, design and marketing. While we were able to achieve the beta stage, we realized that the pace at which the outsourced teams were delivering was not matching with the company’s expectations. Post beta, we needed to be cost-effective, learn from the feedback, and go live quickly.
To achieve this, we decided to hire an in-house team and go back to the drawing board to create the revolutionary app, TraveLibro, as it is today. The second challenge we faced was to hire a team with the right technical skills and knowledge who enable the vision of the company to come to life. While there are many resources available, we believe it’s of upmost importance to hire people whose values and skill sets align with the needs of the company.
The third challenge that we are correctly facing is to ensure that we target the right audience to become the future users of our app. We want to create a travel community where by each user can inspire other users with their unique travel stories.
But hey! All’s well if it ends well!
Future with TraveLibro
We believe that our biggest opportunity is to be the world’s largest Travel Social Network, an area which has not been explored till date. Apart from the obvious word of mouth, we use various social media giants such as Facebook, Google, Instagram and Twitter, to draw users. We are also networking with some of the most popular travel bloggers in the world, so that users of the portal can follow and get inspired by their travel stories.
TraveLibro will give its users an opportunity to quickly sync their past trips in a few simple steps to automatically create a timeline view of their entire trip. Thus, making storytelling of past travels quick, easy and personalized. TraveLibro aims to be a global travel social network where travelers discover the best travel stories. Inspiring other travelers to plan their holidays via discovery of stories on TraveLibro should make travel planning very simple. Additionally, this will be the one market place where travelers can interact with other travelers, travel agents, tour operators, and local guides. Lastly, TraveLibro channels will helps people connect with other travelers based on their interests.
Profile
Co-founders
The co-founders- Monish Shah and Malhar Gala comes from totally different backgrounds.
Monish Shah: He is former investment Banker and a Graduate in Management Studies from University of Mumbai and has completed a Masters in Science from the ICMA Centre, University of Reading. Having a background in International Securities, Investments and Banking, Monish was as an investment banker for eight years at Deutsche Bank before starting TraveLibro.
Malhar Gala: An entrepreneur by nature, Malhar founded a high fashion jewellery company specializing in both Traditional Indian and European designs. Malhar’s business acumen has seen him tide over an extremely poor economic environment and emerge as one of the stronger jewellery houses in India today. It was his unbridled passion for travel and the aspiration to create a ‘global travel community’ that inspired the duo to start the company.
Team
The TraveLibro Team a.k.a TraveLibrans as they like to call themselves is a unit of 20 individuals passionate enough to change the way people tell their travel stories. The team comprises of Co-Founders Monish and Malhar, a content head, a solid team of tech ninjas, marketing professionals, design and motion artists, and content editors.
Follow ups
Website | Facebook |Twitter | Instagram | Vimeo | Mobile App |
Contact Travelibro here:
info@travelibro.com
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