Illuminate Your Journey with Firef.ly

Shawn Low co-founder of firef.ly helps people plan trips while providing travel guides and opportunities to capture those perfect moments. Shawn is part of our Singapore, Melbourne, and London Travel Massive Chapters and has agreed to share with us the secrets to their success. 

Who is your startup for?

Everyone.

Ok, we know that sounds like a catch-all but while our original intention was for avid travellers to use the app, we’ve had incredible feedback from a diverse set of users. We’ve had mums say they would use it to capture their weekend in the park with kids, mates who would use it to capture their pub crawl, travel writers who want to use it as a tool for their work, adventurer travellers who want to share their zany moments spear fishing…the list goes on!

What is your role in the travel industry?

We use an everyday device (smartphones!) to illuminate journeys. The travel app market is severely fragmented. You get travel advice from Tripadvisor or Twitter, you share photos on Instagram/Facebook, you journal on Path/Rove but there’s no one travel app that connects the dots of the travel experience. Firef.ly aims do that.

Firef.ly will help people plan a trip, give them personalised/relevant guided content in a destination, let them capture important moments such as photos, videos, notes, etc. These moments can then be shared with friends and then relieved through tangible, physical mementoes such as photo books and posters.

How is your start up different than others?

There’s been a prevailing notion about doing ‘one thing really well’. This is a formula that has worked for apps like Instagram. While there is a place for that mentality in the startup ecosystem, we believe that our devices are capable of driving richer, more complex experiences.

We believe that people are now able to and want to do more with their smart devices. That’s why Firef.ly help people Plan, Guide, Capture and Relieve their travels.

How did you get your start up off the ground and gaining traction?

Constant hustling helps. After building a working demo and numerous rejections from investors, we finally gained traction when we were awarded a grant worth more than £300k by Innovate UK.

Off the back of the grant, we completed a successful crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs and raised another £343k. This gave us enough runway to last a year.

Around the same time, relationships we had cultivated led to us being invited to the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator programme in London. The programme was great at opening doors, giving us guidance and mentoring and led to also widening our networks.

We are now hard at working on our 2nd beta and are actively testing and refining our product!

Do you have any tips for new entrepreneurs who want to create a successful startup?

1. Test your ideas. Talk to everyone and anyone about it to get their thoughts/feedback.

2. You’ll need a positive outlook and be an eternal optimist.

3. Learn to hustle. You never know: someone you meet could end up being an investor or making useful connections.

4. BUT be genuinely interested in people and their stories. They are means to an end.

5. Be a little crazy. Sometimes your friends, family and even you will feel like you’ve gone mental. But that’s all part of the journey: it takes a little crazy to get stuff off the ground.

As a travel startup, what benefits have you seen from attending Travel Massive meet ups?

We’ve met bloggers and industry folk who we are exploring partnerships. The Singapore chapter’s first meeting was held at the Google office and we had a chance to chat with and meet Google’s head of product marketing, travel. Since then, he’s signed up to be an alpha tester.

NOTE: We have just rolled out our beta to 100+ people and are actively testing and fine tuning. If you’d like to be a beta tester, drop us a line or visit: www.firef.ly.

Travel Start-Up is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world.