Startup Stage: Pink Notebook offers visual-first, social travel planning

Pink Notebook

Pink Notebook is a social travel planning platform that prioritizes visuals in a booking flow. The company aims to create a curated discovery process supported by private collaboration, incorporating machine learning and real-time availability.

Currently in beta and founded by Goedele Mangelaars, Pink Notebook launched in May 2025 and has less than 10 employees. The company is based in New York City.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Pink Notebook is a visual-first, social travel planning platform built for how people actually decide where to go. We take travelers from “I want something chic by the sea” to a booked hotel in one flow. Think: curated discovery meets private collaboration, layered with machine learning and real-time availability. No more jumping between apps, tabs or lists.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

The front end is intentionally visual and intuitive, designed to mirror how people seek inspiration and plan trips with friends. On the back end, we integrate live inventory via global travel consolidators and apply machine learning to tailor recommendations based on user behavior and social context. Our stack supports seamless scaling across hotels, activities and flights, all within a private, shareable board-based interface.

Give us your SWOT analysis.

Strengths:

• Clear brand positioning and design-led product
• Strong travel industry experience through our team’s background and partnerships
• Deep consumer insight validated through interviews and early testing
• Improves travel experience; users can book hotels, flights, etc. all from within the Pink Notebook platform
• Curates ideas, users can share with friends

Weaknesses:

• New entrant in a competitive market
• Currently limited to early-stage content and integrations

Opportunities:

• Social travel remains largely untapped by incumbents
• Growing demand for trusted curation and collaborative planning
• 60% of people don't know where and when they want to travel—Pink Notebook helps users discover that.
• Strategic integrations with fintech, loyalty and lifestyle platforms

Threats:

• Larger players replicating UX once traction is proven
• Balancing personalization at scale without compromising quality
• Geopolitical issues could impact users' travel plans

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate?

For customers: decision fatigue, disjointed planning tools and an overwhelming discovery process that rarely leads to booking.

For the industry: low-quality leads from traditional social media, poor conversion visibility and high dropoff rates between inspiration and transaction. We bridge those gaps.

Now that the product is built, what’s your strategy for customer acquisition?

We’re focusing on building depth before scale. Early growth is driven by exclusivity, targeted user onboarding and private sharing loops that mimic how real trip planning happens among friends. Rather than relying on influencer broadcasts, we’re prioritizing tastemaker seeding, curated content and social product mechanics to drive organic adoption.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

We conducted dozens of in-depth interviews with high-intent travelers—mostly women—who plan multiple leisure trips a year. They consistently described frustration with the fragmented, time-intensive nature of planning and a desire for better tools. The global online travel market exceeds $800 billion and Pink Notebook targets the high-value segment of curated, discretionary leisure travel that isn’t well served by mass-market platforms.

How and when will you make money?

We take a commission on hotels and flights booked through the platform, with monetization starting in Q3 2025. Future versions could introduce curated upgrades and potential brand partnerships within trip boards.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Our CEO combines industry access with experience in strategy, growth and venture with a great network in the travel industry. She holds degrees from Durham University, London School of Economics and Political Science and Columbia.

Our online travel agency (OTA) lead has 30 years of experience in the travel industry, both in early stage as well as C-suite positions. Advisors and collaborators include senior executives from major OTAs, hotel groups and travel tech platforms. The team blends insider insight with outsider ambition.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

As a female-founded company, inclusivity is foundational. Our product reflects a wide range of travel styles and experiences, and we’re intentional about representation across our team, partnerships and content. We aim to build a product that feels personal and relevant to the users we serve, not just optimized for the average.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Staying clear on what we’re building, and for whom. Travel is emotionally driven, but the tools often feel transactional. We’ve had to be disciplined about not chasing every feature or trend and instead focus on building something that genuinely solves a problem for a specific kind of traveler.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact. So why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?

We’re not trying to outspend or outscale incumbents. We're focused on depth, design and product-market fit with a clear user segment. Pink Notebook stands apart by offering a visual, social and collaborative planning experience that current tools simply don’t support.

Unlike many startups and incumbents positioning themselves as AI-first while offering little more than a wrapper, we’re building proprietary models grounded in real user behavior. Our approach to AI is both defensible and genuinely useful, aimed at delivering a 10x better experience for the traveler, not just a tech label. We believe that precision and relevance will outlast a race to the broadest audience.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

By this time next year, we expect to have over 250,000 users and a strong foothold in both the U.S. and European markets. Our fully bookable backend is already live, and we have key partnerships lined up to enhance the shopping and checkout experience across hotels, flights and curated activities. The focus will be on driving repeat use, growing our library of personalized content and refining our AI to deliver smarter, more tailored travel recommendations at scale.

What is your endgame? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

We’re building with long-term independence in mind. For us, this isn’t about scaling quickly for a fast exit. While we remain open to strategic opportunities, our ambition is to grow Pink Notebook into a category-defining company—one that can stand on its own. Whether that means eventually going public or staying private longer, we’re focused on building a product and brand with lasting relevance and real utility.