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Europe, Travel Startups, Travel Tech

Record Your Journey With BackTracker App

Geordie Palmer is a co-founder of the BackTracker app which is helping travellers discover places they didn’t know and record their journey. He is part of our London Travel Massive Chapter and is here to share his stories about building the BackTracker app up from scratch. You can meet a couple of the others from the co-founding team over at Travel Massive, Henry and Felix.

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What inspired you to create this startup?

Frustration.

We’ve all backpacked extensively and have come across the same repeated problems. There was never a really interesting and easy way to record your journey, and it was very difficult to find up-to-date information. In our experience the most useful and rewarding information came from other backpackers – we wanted to create a platform which made this exchange easier.

How did you build your startup?

The idea came to us on a long and rainy boat trip down the Amazon from Leticia to Manaus last summer. We returned to Bristol University for our final year, which is where we fleshed out the idea some more and built BackTracker, launching in April.

What makes your startup different from other similar startups out there?

Most current travel resources exist to give you information – a one-way street if you will. A backpacker is required to make the first move; to search actively for a destination, activity or provider. With us, backpackers can discover information around them and all over the planet about things they didn’t even know existed.

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

A few months after launch we were featured on the App Store as a Best New App, this spike of downloads means that we sit comfortably as the number 1 app if you search backpacking. We’ve just launched a new version which is getting great feedback from our users; the goal now is to take our initial traction and transform it into rapid growth.

What was the most inspiring part during your travels?

A couple of years back I drove from UK to Mongolia through some pretty rogue countries like Iran, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Nowhere in the world have I been treated more kindly by local people than in those countries. It taught me to never judge anyone or anything until you’ve met them or done it yourself.

How do you think we can be better travellers?

Information is more accessible today, though we must be careful to not take too much control away from the individual. Travelling is about self-discovery, broadening your horizons and growing your confidence. At BackTracker we make a point of not doing too much for travellers; we’ve built a platform for them share their own experiences: free to choose, free to make mistakes, free to learn.

As a startup, what benefits have you seen from being a part of Travel Massive meet-ups?

As first time entrepreneurs, with no professional experience in the travel industry, Travel Massive has been invaluable for building a network of people who can help us make BackTracker as great as we know it has the potential to be.

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Travel Start-Up is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. Connect with BackTracker on Travel Massive, Facebook and Twitter


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