How I Built It: Creating Travel Massive's Online Platform and Lessons Learned In 10 Years

Exactly ten years ago I pushed the “launch” button on Travel Massive’s first social network. The idea: give every member who attended our meetups an online profile, so they could connect with other members around the world.

Fast forward 3650 days and everything has been re-written, yet the purpose of travelmassive.com remains exactly the same. This is the longest project I’ve ever worked on, and I’m still meeting new people in the industry every day.

Here’s the story of how I built this platform, plus some learnings, from a decade of working on it.

How it all started

It was summer in Lisbon in 2014 and I was working with a small software team I’d hired to replace Meetup for our chapter events. Travel Massive was a couple of years old, and the website was plugged together with an online spreadsheet that I manually updated with upcoming events. We’d grown to 20 chapters, and each group was using a mix of Facebook pages, Meetup.com, and twtvite (a Twitter event tool my friend Felipe built) to organise their events.

🤔 The problem: Across a decentralized set of event tools, we had no idea who our “members” were, let alone the ability to communicate with them directly. If we wanted to keep growing, we needed to know who our members were.

Travel Massive’s homepage in 2013 was hand-written HTML

A few months earlier at a travel conference in Singapore, I had met Barry Smith (the co-founder of Skyscanner) and he suggested that I focus my efforts on Travel Massive. At this point, it was a fun side-project and I was working on a few different things including a flight meta-search I launched in Australia. I had some savings and decided to take a leap of faith and focus on building Travel Massive and to “see what happens”.

What happened was the creation of one of the world’s biggest tourism networks, spanning over 100 countries.

Building our first Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The mission to build a community platform for Travel Massive started in early 2014. In the first few weeks I explored a lot of options, including licensing existing platforms (such as CreativeMornings) and experimenting with open-source forks of Reddit. Nothing really came close to what we needed, so I decided: “screw it, we can build our own platform!”.

I hired a team in Lisbon and by mid 2014 they delivered a basic MVP. Then weeks later their business got acquired, so they left me with the source code. The platform worked but was nowhere close to being ready to launch. I spent the next few months back in Sydney learning Drupal with the help of Ryan Cross, and finally crafted a “beta” version.

The beta had member profiles, chapter pages, and event registration. After countless all-nighters coding, I pushed the site up to production on new year’s eve, had a drink with my girlfriend, and waited for the first signup.

Travel Massive 1.0

Within a few months, me and Erika Helstrom (our community manager in San Francisco) had onboarded almost 3,000 members to our online community. As we headed to ITB Berlin in March of 2015 to throw our inaugural Travel Massive party, we hit our first 500 person event — still a record to this day!

Travel Massive’s first platform and homepage in March 2015

The early days of the platform were full of excitement as new profiles popped up from all around the word. Behind the scenes I was busy plugging all the gaps in functionality (e.g. there was no search) and releasing daily updates.

Beating the competition

Two direct competitors launched that year — a Swiss startup called 3BaysOver had raised $1.2M and launched an impressive platform, and Travel Weekly UK also launched “Connections” after investing £2M on development.

We had ZERO dollars to invest in development, so I spent my evenings and weekends programming solo to ensure we stayed ahead of them. I imagined the situation as me versus 10 developers. But in reality, it was two unknown brands vs Travel Massive — we had years of brand recognition and an army of community members to support us.

This is where the power of our real life community became evident. We could go head-to-head against millions of dollars of venture capital, and win with our IRL community and events. 3BaysOver ran out of money and shut down overnight, and Travel Weekly abandoned their Connections platform with just over a thousand members (I kept count) and re-purposed the brand for (wait for it) … in-person events.

Communities, if made right, are unbeatable.

Open-sourcing the platform

I also decided to open-source the platform and make it freely available for other community builders.

My motivation was to help people create their own communities — similar to how WordPress powered millions of free blogs. Hardware Massive (a community for makers), Mappy Hour (a community for outdoor enthusiasts) and Nomadic Network all launched using our platform. I also presented at CMX Summit and shared our developments.

At its peak, almost 100,000 people were using Massive Platform, our open-source community software

Innovate or Die

When 2020 hit, we pivoted to online events and an open support network as the global tourism industry shut down — including hosting the UK’s Institute of Travel and Technology (ITT) careers festival for over 500 tourism students.

In those first few months, our newsletter bounce-rate skyrocketed. I realised that that the recovery was also going to need a huge data cleanup — half our members lost their jobs or businesses and thousands of links were now broken.

Stuck at home in Tasmania and with the tourism industry at a standstill, it was time to make a stand.

Wireframes for a new Travel Massive platform (2020)

I’d been discussing with Kevin O’Shaughnessy about a new architecture designed around content. When I had built Travel Massive’s original platform it was designed around chapters and events. If we could pivot to focus on content, then members could easily share their projects and ideas, and get feedback from the community.

Sharing ideas is at the core of Travel Massive’s mission and what made our events popular —  and we needed to bring this aspect of collaboration to our members online. If we didn’t innovate, our efforts would end here.

The only catch was that we’d have to build the platform, again.

Travel Massive 2.0

In 2021 I started designing the “new” Travel Massive and enlisted Matt Platts and Peter Daams to help. The new design was minimalist and discarded every non-essential feature so we could meet our targets. I spent the next few months learning Elixir and LiveView (our new tech stack), while Maria Stoyanova took the role as beta-tester.

The new build contained a lot of new innovations — including password-less sign in, better privacy controls (we even ditched Google Analytics), streamlined event management, and a true SPA (Single Page App) experience.

In late 2021 we finally released the new platform for Travel Massive… some 6.5 years after our first. I migrated about half of the accounts across (there’s no reason keeping profiles of members who left the industry) and held a Zoom party in my garden with our chapter leaders around the world to celebrate. Those were the days!

New homepage shortly after launch in October 2021

I was also careful to preserve the history of our community, so I migrated all our past events and moved over a thousand old blog posts to static hosting. There’s some fantastic stories and memories in there.

One of the first campaigns we ran on our new platform was our 50 Hot Travel Startups competition, featuring all the product launches we’d featured in the past 12 months. This ended in a huge contest between NaviSavi and Tripsider in the final days (see the voting animation), and thousands of new members joining to support their favourite startup.

After a two year hiatus, the Travel Massive community was finally back in action!

How it’s going, and the future

In the past two years, I’ve added many new improvements — from the homepage design, to our member and company directory, event management tools, influencer analytics, plus moved our hosting to a dedicated server in Europe.

The Travel Massive homepage in December 2024

Being able to work on a project like this for the past 10 years has been a wonderful privilege — and I hope it’s helped many people in the tourism and travel industry to build their startups, careers and make new connections.

The future of Travel Massive ultimately rests with the community and where we decide to grow the network. As long as there’s thousands of members getting value from our online community, I’ll continue to support this platform.

Lessons I learned along the way

Here’s a few helpful pointers I learned, if you’re building an online product or service:

Look and design for patterns. With the exception of a few edge cases, most people are doing the same things on your website. Find patterns in behaviour and try to improve that experience. For example — automatically redirecting people who sign in to the page they originally landed on is an easy improvement.

Soft launch frequently. Instead of releasing major new features, soft launch a series of incremental updates. This will help you get faster feedback from users and allow you to discreetly resolve any issues. When you’re happy with the feature, you can announce it in your newsletter, since most people won’t notice until you tell them.

It’s OK to use your gut feeling. Too many people are taught to believe that A/B testing is the way to build a product, but unless you have millions of dollars on the line (e.g. a booking engine) it’s not worth the effort. Go with your instincts, plus a little bit of online research and any available analytics to make a quick decision.

Be obsessed with your users (experience). Users of your product are looking to solve a problem or achieve a goal — so build functionality based on helping them do that efficiently. Unnecessary clicks or pop-ups are just friction.

The need for speed. If you aren’t measuring the performance of your website (e.g with tools like Google Pagespeed) then you are probably losing visitors. Be sure to optimise everything as every millisecond counts!

— Thanks for reading and I hope you found this article valuable. Happy travels!