TheLater is an app for iOS that helps travelers organize their trip research.
A Q&A with founder Ashley Byers:
Tell us how you founded the company, why and what made you decide to jump in and create the business.
I created theLATER to help people organize the places and events they want to remember for future travel and local exploration.
As a business and leisure traveler, I was constantly reading and hearing about interesting experiences -- art exhibits, unique hotels, secret hikes, must-see plays and more.
The problem I kept running into was one of timing – I would read about a restaurant opening in Portland that sounded amazing, but I was not going to be there for a few months.
I needed a way to remember that restaurant review when I landed in Portland. I interviewed hundreds of people – bloggers, business friends, travelers – everyone had the same problem.
Each person had their own system to try and remember (phone notes, emails to self, etc…) and none of these systems worked.
It became clear that there was a universal need for an easy-to-use, intuitive way for people to quickly save experiential content and recall the information the moment they need it.
TheLATER integrates mobile and desktop bookmarking to make it super easy to save articles along with the places and events they describe.
Size of the team, names of founders, management roles and key personnel?
I founded theLATER with Jeff Marowits.
I have over a decade of experience in online consumer services and digital media firms including Travelzoo, Shopzilla and Pubmatic.
Jeff co-founded AirWave Wireless, where he was General Counsel and VP, Business Development. AirWave was later sold to Aruba Networks, a public company that still offers the AirWave solution across its product line.
Funding arrangements?
theLATER’s product development (desktop and iPhone app) and marketing has been funded by the founding team. We are currently raising outside capital from strategic investors.
Estimation of market size?
Digital advertising is a $45 billion annual industry, of which as much of as 15% is travel and entertainment.
TheLATER’s active community of intentional travelers provides a particularly attractive advertising monetization opportunity to capture significant share of this approximately $7 billion market.
Competition?
TheLATER allows you to bookmark and save the places and events you read about with the stories that helped you discover them.
Once you save these articles, your friends in theLATER community can see what you saved and read the articles you recommend. This solves two problems – organization and discovery.
Accordingly, we touch two different competitors – bookmarking tools and travel discovery sites. We take a different approach from each of them.
Save-for-later tools are helpful for saving articles to read later.
But travel articles have a unique problem: (1) you never know when you will be traveling to the city you are reading about, and (2) articles are much more valuable when they are organized by the places and events they describe.
Save-for-later tools are not designed to solve this particular travel problem.
There are tons of travel and local discovery sites offering recommendations. The problem is that most people have multiple sources they use to learn about places and events – they do not want to commit to a single recommendation site.
We give our users a single place to organize all their content, wherever they find it.
Revenue model and strategy for profitability?
TheLATER is focused on growing our audience. In the future, we plan to implement a mix of advertising and branded content for monetization.
What problem does the business solve?
TheLATER solves two problems, one for users and one for journalists/publishers.
For users, theLATER provides tools to help them organize the places and events they read and hear about and attach articles for future reference.
TheLATER not only benefits the individual, but also other users who want visibility into their friends’ and trusted experts’ saved places and events.
For journalists and publishers, theLATER extends the life and audience for travel journalism by letting users save and share stories so they are accessed many times in the future.
This also provides great recurring revenue for publishers.
How did the initial idea evolve and were there changes/any pivots along the way in the early stages?
The inspiration for theLATER came from our love for travel research and saving places/events for both planned trips and future trips. It expanded from there to include local places and events – because we think that travelers like to adventure in their home cities as well.
We also introduced social aspects because so much of what people do with travel is listen to friends and travel writers– theLATER automates this process by letting the community see the places and events others save and recommend so that each user can discover new and interesting experiences.
Why should people or companies use the business?
Here are a few specific examples:
- You are reading the New York Times and come across a “36 hours in Tokyo” article. The article mentions a hotel and restaurant that you want to remember for later.
You save the article along with the hotel and restaurant to theLATER. When it comes time to plan your trip to Japan you have this info saved and mapped for easy recall.
- You read on Eater about a new Vietnamese restaurant in Chinatown, NYC. You save the article with the restaurant. Next time you are in Chinatown you use the app to find the restaurant.
You pull up the attached article to remember the dishes the author raved about. A week later a friend asks you the name of the restaurant, you use theLATER to recall the name and send the info.
- You are planning a trip to London... You have a list of travel sites and blogs that are your go-to-resources for trip planning. One mentions that Frieze London, a yearly art event, will be going on while you are there. You add the event to theLATER so it's mapped and dated so you don't forget about it when you arrive in London.
What is the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition (apart from PR)?
We are growing theLATER’s user base through a mix of user-to-user marketing and engagement with the travel journalism community.
Users of theLATER community are inviting their friends to join theLATER so they can share and access their friends’ saved content.
We are driving growth through partnerships with the travel journalism community by providing unique insights and access to where and how stories live on past publication.
The most saved stories on theLATER are becoming a new measure of reach and influence.
Where do you see the company in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
In three years, saving to theLATER will be habit of all travelers – every time they read anything, in any format, they will naturally save it to theLATER. At that point, theLATER becomes the single, reliable place you can visit to recall all the things you want to experience.
As theLATER community grows, the strength and intelligence of the recommendations will continue to improve.
To get there, as with all sites, theLATER must get noticed. There are so many new products online each day, breaking through is the key. theLATER’s community of users and interested journalists provide the key to rise above and get noticed, but it will not be easy.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that it requires a startup like yours to help it out?
Local and travel journalism has a timing challenge - events may not be happening for months or we may not be visiting a destination we are reading about for years. theLATER solves this problem.
Every time a reader sees something they are interested in, they can save it and reference it the moment they need it.
What other technology company (in or outside of travel) would you consider yourselves most closely aligned to in terms of culture and style... and why?
Airbnb launched in a category that already existed but wasn’t optimized for travelers or hosts. They added crucial functionality and opened the space to an entirely new audience. Our vision for theLATER is to solve the organizational issue for individuals, which will ultimately benefit the journalists creating the content.
Which company would be the best fit to buy your startup?
We are most closely aligned with the travel journalism industry, which would make the large publishers natural allies and potential acquirers. But theLATER’s value is in working across ALL travel sites rather than being owned by any single company.
Our independence and focus makes it most valuable as a stand-alone company.
Describe your startup in three words?
Personal Travel Organization.
Tnooz view:
TheLater app is easy to use and stylish to look at.
But as a traveler, I simply use Evernote, a note-taking app and browser-based tool, to save articles and store notes. Evernote's tagging and quick search system does the trick.
More visually oriented people prefer Pinterest.
The "social" features of TheLater, such as finding out what tastemakers thought was important to flag, is interesting. On the other hand, Gogobot has already developed a large community of social travel recommendations from experienced travelers.
TheLater faces a marketing challenge, too. It doesn't currently seem to be embracing any growth hacking techniques, per se.
Yet the founders have definitely pinpointed a pain point with travelers. No one solution will have universal appeal, and there's plenty of room in the market for a tool like TheLater to succeed.
We wish the founders well.