In this interview, the Fora co‑founder outlines the company’s origin, funding goals, and rapid growth. The business plan was drafted in March 2021 with a target of raising at least $2 million to avoid bootstrapping, leading to incorporation in June, the addition of a third co‑founder in August, and the launch of the first website version in November 2021. The initial pilot involved three non‑professional bookers who received intensive support, testing the idea of activating travel‑enthusiastic individuals as advisors. Within a year the network expanded to roughly 250 monthly active bookers and about 500 advisors who have each taken at least one booking, with 97 % of advisors having never sold travel professionally. The model emphasizes flexibility—participants work seasonally or around personal events rather than meeting strict quotas—mirroring the Compass real‑estate approach of onboarding passionate newcomers instead of existing industry pros. The discussion highlights community‑centric growth metrics (monthly active bookers) and the strategic aim to scale beyond the $2 million capital threshold.
Chapters
Yeah, so jumping right into Fora, you know, could you maybe just give us like an overview of where we're at today and what sense of scale you're at?
Sure. So we— so the business plan was written in like March 2021 or so, and that's when Henley and I basically said that we'll do this if we can raise like at least $2 million of capital, because we also didn't want to do this from like a bootstrapped— again, we're both in our 40s, we have families, like that's not something that we were able to do. We needed to kind of get going quickly. So March, we wrote the plan and decided to work together on it. We incorporated the business in June. Our 3rd co-founder, Jake, joined us in August. This is 2021. We launched the first version of the website in November 2021. So we're about a year old from that standpoint. And we launched the first sort of, you know, service experience with 3 people that had never sold travel before that we were giving our support to. It was mainly at the time, it wasn't tools, we hadn't built any tools yet. So it was mainly like support and attention and seeing if we can activate kind of normal people who love travel to be successful advisors. So that was in like October, November, sort of over the summer and then October, November that we started to Really kind of experiment with them. So I think in October we had three active bookers. Last month we had about 250 active bookers. So that like in about a year, that's like the rough sort of scale of the network. October was not a small month actually because a few of those bookers were already doing you know sort of holiday bookings and things like that, and the economy was in a pretty good place, and people were you know revenge travel and everything. So people were looking to To get out there and travel, but you know we've like I don't know 50x the business since then over the past year. Like if we look at October or November versus October, November this year, and so we yeah so we have about 250 active bookers, a little more than 250 active bookers. We we have about 500 advisors that have taken. At least a booking. So the activity, because it's designed to be flexible, it's not really like a like a like a like a job that you're committing a certain amount of time to, except in a loose sense. So there's a lot of people that take the summer off because that's the kind of flexibility that they're looking for. There's a lot of people that actually kind of do this around a wedding or a honeymoon themselves or for a friend, and then they go away for a couple months, and then they come back because they have day jobs. So. We don't really look at how many people are like hitting quotas or something like that. It's much more, is the activity of the community kind of growing every month? So this idea of our version of like Facebook's MAU is like monthly active bookers. So last month we had 250 active bookers, about 500 advisors have taken a booking. 97% of these advisors have never sold travel professionally in any kind of capacity. They are the go-to person for travel tips. They are passionate and engaged around the idea of turning this into some sort of a casual vocation or a more serious career change, but they're not agents. And that's a very big difference with our business. And for example, the Compass model in real estate is we're not looking for existing pros really. We're looking to activate and onboard all sorts of people that have all the soft qualities to be successful sellers of travel and successful entrepreneurs, but for whatever reason, largely structural in many cases from what the industry provides, haven't yet made that leap.
