What if your travel story could inspire wannabe travellers to do it too?
I remember how excited we were after the interview with Dalene and Peter, the Modern Nomads. What they were doing sounded great: they were following their heart to wherever their next house sitting job might take them. They were seeing, tasting and experiencing the world, bit by bit.
What if that “Travel Bug” as Nicole would put it 🙂 is contagious? Or better yet, what if it can be used as a vaccine against boredom and comformity?
When we saw the travel book project the guys from “We Get There” were cooking up we wanted to find out more about this colaborative travel story book and the idea behind it.
To quote Killer Startups: “In essence, WeGetThere is a crowdfunding platform for travelers. This site enables just anybody to enlist the help of his friends and relatives when it comes to his dream trip or holiday. The person will be able to create a profile and start raising funds. And those who collaborate with him will actually receive rewards for their efforts. That is, besides the joy and satisfaction that comes from making other realize their dreams, people who helped them become true will get a tangible reward for their support”
Here’s a short interview with David Nagy, the founder of the travel startup.
eDreams: What is wegetthere? Is it an NGO, a startup, a publisher?
David: “wegetthere.com is a startup founded by 4 people who love LOVE LOVE to travel.”
Why crowd-funding?
“One year ago, I found out about the death of a friend. He was only 27. This led me to asking myself a hard question: What do I want to do with my life? I was having a blast working at Bucharest Hubb, but I knew that I could do a lot more, I just needed a little push and this was it.”
“To find out what was THE thing for me to do, my mission in life, I thought about taking a break and go to Indonesia, but… I didn’t have enough money to do that. At that time, I knew about a few crowd funding platform and I tried to find one dedicated to travellers… but to my surprise I couldn’t find any!”
“Then, without even going anywhere, I realised that this was it! This was what I want to bring to life.”
How will it work?
“People will be able to write their “dream trip” (why and where they want to go) and add pictures and videos to help them tell their story and gain trust. They will set a goal (how much money they need to make the trip happen) and also add a few rewards for the people who support them. All this information will be reviewed by our team and if it fits our guidelines it will go live on our website. If the traveller reaches his or her goal, he will get the money and he can hit the road.”
“It’s a pretty simple process, but still it’s work do be done.”
Tell me a little about the book; how did you decide to print a book? And why a travel stories book?
“We love to travel and we know that many other people love to travel… and definitely a bunch of these people have stories to tell… so why not have these stories in a book?”
Why 111? Why not 112?
“We like challenges and playing games with numbers. Put simply, 111 stories from 111 people until 11/11/11 at 11:11:11 GMT just seemed to make a great story to tell our friends.”
When can we expect to see the book in print? What about kindle, ipad editions?
“We’ll launch a digital book pack: PDF, ePUB (for iPhone & iPad) and MOBI (for Amazon Kindle) in around 3-4 weeks. In 2 months we hope to have the print version (which will be self-published) available on Amazon.”
