Interview With Samuel Daams – Founder Of Travellers Point

By: Michael Dunlop     Topics: Blog Samuel Daams Co-founded Travellerspoint.com with his brother Peter Daams back in 2002 while discussing the idea of starting a travel site. Travellerspoint now nurtures over 100,000 travellers worldwide! First off – can we have a little background information on Samuel – Where you live? How old you are? What motivates you? What inspires you?

My name is Samuel Daams, but for most it's just Sam. Living in Oslo because of the beautiful women, 31 years of age, one daughter with one of aforementioned beautiful Norwegian women, aka as my wife.

What motivates me? Largely it's the fun and challenges of running your own business. Even when things are going really well, there's always something you want to improve. The next application or site you want to build, idea you want to develop etc. You'll let yourself savour a few minutes when you or your site gets mentioned on the BBC, but after that you need to think of how you can make that kind of thing keep happening. And when things get challenging you have enough motivation just knowing you have to step up not just for yourself but for staff working for you. A few years ago I took over a company on the verge of bankruptcy here in Norway. Thinking back I must have been crazy, but I just knew it would work out (and it has). Going through a company like that and seeing the potential. What is there not to be motivated by?!

All kinds of things inspire me. I love looking at beautifully designed websites. Lately I've really been into approaching websites from a usability point of view. Looking at how amazing some of the work out there is really inspires me.

1) You are most famous as the founder of TravellersPoint.com – tell us, how did you get started and when you did start, did you ever imagine it would become as successful as it has? (What were your original goals for TravellersPoint.com?)

Back in 2002 my brother Peter (based in Australia) and me (at the time based in the Netherlands) were chatting on MSN and came up with the idea of creating a place to reunite with lost travel friends. Peter was looking to improve on some web development he had picked up and needed a challenge and I thought it'd be fun in my spare time, so we just took it from there. We launched Travellerspoint 3 months later and it was very much a hobby site that we both ran in our spare time. We had absolutely no expectations, something I like to think shows from our initial hosting plan at 6USD a month. We were amazed when the site started getting great reviews from established icons in the industry and attracting thousands of new members!

We didn't really have a goal; just an idea and felt it was a good one. We were travellers who had travelled, met people, lost contact with those same people and who wanted a site where you could track down those old travel mates. It was a pretty simple idea and about the extent of our early goals.

2) TravellersPoint.com has now grown to become one of the leading Wed 2.0 website on the subject of travel – can you highlight anything in particular / a policy or approach that led to this happening? To put it another way, there are plenty of websites on travel, what made yours stand out and get such a large following so fast?

In part we were lucky I'm sure. We started right in the middle of the dot com collapse and no one was getting into websites. It'd be far harder to pull off something similar today, in fact I'm sceptical to well over 50% of the travel sites I see popping up these days, but that's another story. One thing that always has worked really well for us is a personal touch. Peter and me are still actively posting away on our travel forums, some of the busiest out there. The feedback and suggestions we get from being so personally involved is phenomenal, although unfortunately we can't implement every good idea that's suggested! Another thing that has helped has been the ability to continuously develop new products and services. You have to keep being creative and give your users more reasons to come back.

3) I was reading your website and notice that you now have what are called "Travel Helpers" – this sounds like a great idea to me. How did you manage to get this of the ground?

This is probably a bit of the luck I mentioned in the previous question. In the first few months Peter was surfing around and came across a database of travel helpers, containing email addresses to 1500 or so volunteers that were offering their services to other travellers visiting their country/city. There was a note on the site about it closing down so Peter emailed the administrator and asked about it. He was more than happy to have someone keep running the service so just left it to us. We quickly tied the service in with our private messaging solution so as to stop the public display of email addresses that had been the case till then and emailed each travel helper asking if they would consider signing up on Travellerspoint and offering their service there instead. The response was fantastic and really gave us something unique early on. It's still being copied today by other travel sites, which is fun to see.

4) I am very impressed with how your website works (navigation / loading times) – when you first started getting a lot of visitors, what kind of issues did you have from a backend / web development point of view? When for example did you move to a dedicated server. Is the "Back end" custom built by yourselves?

Yes, the entire site is custom built, including the backend CMS, wiki, forum and blogging software. We had to move to a more expensive plan than our original 6USD one after just a few months I recall. I'm pretty sure we ended up moving to a dedicated server about 2 years in, but we've had to add on so often I've lost track. Keeping a site loading fast is tough and we'll still have the occasional unexplainable slowdown that only a server restart will set right.

5) For someone new to building websites, is there anything in particular that you would suggest that they do not do? Something to avoid?

Things have come a long way since we started out, and I'd say one thing you should certainly consider strongly is if you really want to code everything yourself. There is just so much good open source software out there, it's often a much better path to take if you are starting out. Otherwise I'd say you should try just about anything and learn the hard way. Read a lot on forums and blogs, but don't rely blindly on what others tell you is true either.

6) You do not have to give use exact details (well not unless you wish to) – but how do you go about monetizing the website? What are your sourses of revenue?

Pretty much the standard ones for travel sites. Advertising & travel related products. We've toyed in our minds with paid memberships, but never really been able to convince ourselves this could work.

7) What are your top tips for writing a successful Travel Article?

I think this depends a lot on your goal (social media, for your members, for friends etc.). Define your goal and research the topic and you should be good to go.

8) If you could go back in a time machine to the time when you were first making a name for yourself as a website owner, what advice would you give yourself?

Focus even more on the social aspect of travelling, earlier on.

9) Is there anyone that you look up to and model yourself on? (You can name more than one)

There's plenty of people I look up to, but I can't think of anyone I'm modelling myself on. It's hard not to admire someone like Steve Jobs who comes back to a company he founded and then turns it around by focus and commitment. I admire one of my old managers at Nike a lot, but that might just be because she managed to deal with me being a young 'know it all' brat

10) Do you have any favourite business related or personal development related books that you can recommend to other entrepreneurs?

I recently finally finished reading 'Losing my Virginity' by Richard Branson. A great read and some interesting insight in the game of continuously re-financing a portfolio of companies.

11) What is the best advice you have ever been given?

You can't help who your parents are, but you can choose your in-laws. Haha, kidding of course. There's not really anything that springs to mind.

12) What advice would you give to a Young Entrepreneur setting up their first business?

Set up a business targeted at a product or topic you are passionate about. No matter how rough it gets, this will help you through.

13) If the Internet had not existed – what do you think you would be doing?

Probably working at a largish international company in some kind of marketing or operations related role.

14) What do you like best about the Internet?

The speed with which information can be found. From a business point of view, the incredibly low borders to enter just about any market.

15) What do you like least about the Internet?

People and companies need to start considering privacy implications more like they do in the offline world. From a business point of view, the incredibly low borders to enter the market are also a negative, especially for sites fending off competition. It keeps you continuously on your toes, whereas in the offline world it's much easier to defend a dominant position.

16) Have you any plans (personal or business) that you can share with us about your future plans / goals / lifetime goals?

At the moment on Travellerspoint a lot of development is going into expanding our budget accommodation area. I'm especially excited about the concept of Social Bookings that we've launched as one of the first in the world, if not *the* first! We also just re-launched Travelblogs.com and are working on some new angles there. As always, there are plenty of other ideas and projects in the pipeline, but unfortunately can't share any information on those yet. Personally I'm looking forward to spending a year or two living abroad. It's one of the goals my wife and me have set for the next few years so now we're just trying to make a decision on when to do so. That's another great thing about running online businesses by the way; the ability to work from any location with a good internet connection!