This is a follow up story for Under30Experiences. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 3 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

I’m Matt Wilson, Co-founder and CEO of Under30Experiences, a group travel company for people aged 21-35.

We run international trips for young adults to over twenty different countries like Costa Rica, Iceland, Thailand, and Peru. Our travelers want to make friends and see the world.

I’ve been traveling all around the world for the past decade and have built friendships of a lifetime. Under30Experiences has been named multiple times to the Inc. 5000 List of Fastest Growing Private Companies in America!

You can read our first interview here.

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Hiking the Inca Trail in Peru. Photo credit: Cody McLain

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

When we last spoke, we were amid the pandemic, and our operations were temporarily paused. Since then, we’ve come into a massive travel boom! Between 2022 and 2023, revenue is up 40%.

While the pandemic was sad for us, watching so many friends and colleagues in the industry lose their jobs or go out of business, we’re happy to report that Under30Experiences made it out of the other side of that difficult time period. The silver lining for us was the opportunity to become much more profitable.

Post-COVID, we are no longer looking to grow top-line revenue at all costs. Instead, we’ve focused on systematically becoming more profitable by doing less with more.

In 2020, we had a physical office in Austin, Texas. Being responsible for the livelihood of so many full-time employees in the United States was stressful. Now, we have a very small team, with just one full-time employee in the US. The rest of our team is distributed throughout the world. I even convinced my wife to move our family to Puerto Rico, so we’re off on another adventure!

As entrepreneurs, it's easy to chase every shiny new object. Avoid this. It is important to focus and understand that one or two things are driving a significant portion of your business. Triple down on them.

We also decided to double down on working with specialists in areas such as SEO, advertising, and web design. Pre-COVID, we did a lot of these things in-house. Working with contractors is a lot easier than hiring full-time employees. For example, we work with a part time CFO through a company called Bookkeeper360, who we never could afford to pay full-time. Their team has helped us navigate the world of finance and accounting tremendously.

We’ve also doubled down on our “tech stack” and have looked for tools to help us leverage our time. Moving our email marketing to Klaviyo has been a huge help for us in boosting sales through our email list. We love the data that this tool brings us.

Since we last spoke, we’ve also had a couple of nice PR features, including on CNN and Newsweek. CNN was an inbound request which is always nice, and Newsweek was via our friends at Community Co that we’ve known through our involvement in the Young Entrepreneurs Council.

We’re happy to share that we’ve launched several new amazing trips since we last spoke, including Croatia, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, South Africa, Colombia, and Prague, Vienna, & Budapest. We also launched an entirely new line for people in their 30s and 40s called Over30Experiences!

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

Our biggest challenge with having a small marketing team is where to spend our time and money. Last year, we went all in and spent six figures on Google Ads, but we’re not sure how well they were converting. As a test, we shut them off completely and didn’t see a huge dip in sales.

Our experience working with an advertising agency to run our Google Ad campaign was okay, but at the end of the day, we weren’t impressed with the results.

We’ve decided to spread our marketing budget across ads, SEO, social media, and email marketing as our big spending in the coming year. The thing with advertising is you are burning money, and when you stop investing in them, the flow of customers gets turned off.

One of the factors in our decision to invest in SEO is that the changes stay on your website and bring in customers for a long time after you make that investment. The same could be said about building a social media following or an email list. Those two things build enterprise value, whereas advertising doesn’t.

There have also been significant economic and geopolitical headwinds that have been challenging in Q3 and Q4 of 2023. Inflation has hit all of the countries that we visit and driven up the prices of our trips significantly.

Inflation has also hit consumers at home, driving up the cost of living. This has made our travelers more price-sensitive. Consumer debt has reached an all-time high, so people may be looking to cut back in 2024. We are seeing fewer people book our expensive trips like New Zealand and Greece, for example.

Furthermore, instability in the Middle East has hurt our trips to Egypt and Jordan. Although traveling to the tourist parts of these regions is perfectly safe, people were apprehensive when the conflict first started, so we saw a lot of cancellations for the region.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

One of the biggest lessons we learned in 2023 was to start small with paid marketing efforts. Our three-person marketing team, which includes both Co-founders who have other responsibilities, can only manage so many reports, creatives, angles, and ideas, even with a contractor managing the ads.

Last year, we had Google and Meta ads running, which meant we needed separate creatives for each, and new contractors for both platforms to help us manage our ad spend. If we could do it all over again, we would have just focused on one platform until we maxed out our daily profitable ad spend and then moved on to the next platform.

Just because your competitor is implementing a fancy new AI tool or growing their following posting on TikTok doesn’t mean you should shift your strategy. Do small tests, collect sufficient data, analyze it, and pick a few winners to focus on.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

In the next year, we want to continue to expand our offerings by creating trips to several new exotic locations, including India, Japan, and South Korea.

We have a private WhatsApp Group where we can poll our customers about where they want to go next. We even get granular about their preferences for itineraries. Keeping our community engaged has been one of our keys to success.

Another trend we are seeing is “buy now, pay later.” With the success of firms like Klarna and Affirm, consumers want the option to pay over time. Airbnb, for example, has a very popular partnership with Klarna that allows travelers to break their trip into three or four monthly payments. We plan to implement one of these options for our travelers soon.

This year, we are also getting more aggressive with our deposit option. For the entire month of February, we’ll have a promotion going where people can book with just $195 down and pay the rest later with a savings of $200. Our mission is to make travel more accessible to young people, and these types of promotions help.

Over the next five years, we plan to continue to grow aggressively while maintaining healthy profitability for our company. We don’t have specific revenue goals for a five-year timeframe, but what is important to us is that we keep delivering on our mission and have a good time doing it.

Our business supports many people all around the world beyond our core team who work in the office. We work with 50+ guides all around the world and countless small businesses that we support. This could be anyone from the señora, who our travelers buy popsicles from in Costa Rica, to our porters on the Inca Trail, who come from a remote area in the Andes Mountains. It’s important to us that we continue to scale what we do but do it in a way that is sustainable to the local communities we operate in.

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

One of the best books I’ve read in the past year is called “Die With Zero: Getting All You Can From Your Money and Your Life” by Bill Perkins. It’s a great take on taking full advantage of life and a fantastic reminder that life is too precious to work the whole time. Under30Experiences is a great business with a promising trajectory, but we don’t operate it at the expense of our health, our families, or the environment.

While we don’t use the word “lifestyle business” because the term often means a small part-time business, our company provides a great lifestyle to our two co-founders and the people who work here. We all love to travel and enjoy the flexibility that comes with working in the travel industry.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

As entrepreneurs, it's easy to chase every shiny new object. Avoid this. It is important to focus and understand that one or two things are driving a significant portion of your business. Triple down on them.

It’s also easy to keep doing things just because they are profitable. Remember, you only have so much time and money. Just because an ad on Snap is profitable doesn’t mean it’s the best use of those funds. Managing those ads also costs you time, and time is money. That money could also be spent on something more profitable. Again, focus!

Small businesses can spread thin quickly. Good luck trying to support dozens of products with SEO or paid ads at the same time with a few-person team. Focus on your big winners and put your time and money into marketing them.

Just because your competitor is implementing a fancy new AI tool or growing their following posting on TikTok doesn’t mean you should shift your strategy. Do small tests, collect sufficient data, analyze it, and pick a few winners to focus on.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We aren’t hiring at the moment, but there is a good chance in the future that we look into bringing on a fractional or part time Chief Marketing Officer.

Where can we go to learn more?

If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!