Startup Spotlight: Tribevibe founder launches a community for untourists

Tribevibe aims to connect travellers and provides a platform for meaningful connections and experiences to happen.

 Zlatko Najdenovski is a UX designer, founder of Tribevibe. His latest passion is ethical design, where he puts ethical principles at the forefront in everything he designs: from uncovering dark UX patterns to advocating clients to go privacy-first and build tech-minimal products. Zlatko is a member of Travel Massive Kiev and Tallinn.

Read on to learn more about how and why Tribevibe was created.

How did you get into the travel industry?

I wouldn’t say I’m into the travel industry, as much as I’m into the hospitality aspect of it. Travel for me has always been more about the people I meet than the places I visit.

What is Tribevibe?

In essence, Tribevibe is a community for those what I call, untourists. It helps travellers meet or get hosted by locals.

Travellers are passionate to experience new places from the locals’ eyes; they want to share meaningful time with them, to create global friendships, and to experience a sense of belonging in this world.

At the very core, Tribevibe’s mission is to create a positive impact through human connections worldwide.

What makes Tribevibe unique?

Tribevibe not only solves the hospitality challenge for travellers, but is also aimed to empower the exchange of culture, skills, ideas, and experiences. It inspires inter-connectedness and creates grounds for transformative altruism.

Because, as travellers, we don’t only tick off countries we’ve visited, but we dare to open our hearts and minds for life-transforming journeys.

How is your startup changing the future of travel?

I believe that we advance into an age where the pursuit of self-discovery through travel is becoming the norm. This idea permeates in almost every post-graduate, every college drop-out, every student taking a gap-year, and everyone who decides to quits their daily job to embrace a world of self-discovery and transformation.

With Tribevibe, we’re offering an online tool for such a community to happen and with that, to empower people of similar lifestyle and aspirations to meet, host, and share meaningful moments.

Is Tribevibe a replacement for Couchsurfing?

Tribevibe is in the same niche as CouchSurfing. Thus, it’s only natural to offer the same core service — hospitality for budget travellers. Product-wise, the significant differentiator is in the way the community grows.

With Tribevibe, I introduced an invite system, where in order to become a member, you need to receive an invite from an existing one. This empowers current members to have control and responsibility who gets in.

I believe this fundamental difference will help the community expand with the right people having the right vibe. Because in this niche, a vibrant community spirit is paramount to a successful product.

What’s another travel company you admire and why?

It’s hard to pick just one, but I’ve always admired a company called Basecamp. There are a couple of things I like about them. It’s their philosophical consistency over their 20 years business. I’ve witnessed how this consistency has created them a customer base that can entirely trust the company because their online tools always cater to this ideology of simple and usable technology. Their vision has always been focused on long-term success.

Follow Zlatko on Travel Massive to connect with him and learn more about Tribevibe.