In a pivot, Trippy, a social trip-planning site, has relaunched as a travel question-and-answer service.
Consumers can now pose questions, such as "Dog-friendly hotels in Chelsea under $150/night", and get answers from other experts -- not just people within their friend networks.
Today it announced it has received $3.5 million in Series A funding, in a round led by equity firm eVentures, with True Ventures and Sequoia Capital also chipping in.
This comes on top of $1.75 million in an earlier round of investment, led by Sequoia and True Ventures.
Tnooz notes that the Q&A travel space is super-competitive, including Quora, the Q&A site, Jelly (a visual Q&A mobile app) Locish, Conciergist, Gogobot, Facebook, and TripAdvisor's forums, not to mention the three-year old Ask A Nomad iPad app.
Meanwhile in "a reverse Trippy", India-based Mygola initially launched as a Q&A platform, and after 2 years it pivoted to a trip planning platform.
Full circle
Trippy's new effort to "enable your friends to plan your trip" is in many ways a return to its original premise. (See Tnooz's first TLabs profile.)
In 2012, Trippy pivoted from helping friends plan trips to more of a bookmarking service. At the time, founder JR Johnson explained on the Quora Q&A site:
While users loved the utility trippy provides (allowing friends to socially collaborate on trip ideas), people wanted to see more of what their friends were doing and even thinking about doing. Also, more pictures was a frequent request.
So we built an inspiration engine that allows users to not only get inspiration from their friends but also browse beautiful photography to get inspired.
Once inspired and ready to actually take the trip, trippy still let's friends help each other make those trips great.
Today Trippy switches back to the trip-planning idea, only now with an empahsis on experts.
To grow its user base, Trippy embraces search engine optimization (SEO), according to TechCrunch, which broke the funding news.
Some industry critics may be surprised to see a travel website using SEO as a key growth strategy, given that much industry talk in the past 18 months or so has been about moving away from that as a growth technique.
Trippy, indeed.
Yet the ability of similar site Quora to raise $80 million earlier this month suggests new life in the Q&A format.
Plus Trippy's emphasis on visuals and its existing database of answers from high profile travelers like Anthony Bourdain and Tim Ferriss suggest it may have the edge over its rivals in the appeal of its product -- and not just in funding.
It's founder JR Johnson's fourth startup. Many critics will be curious if this one is another success