Alyssa Ravasio - Supply, Demand, and the Outdoors - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 31]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types.
Founder's Field Guide is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all of our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:59)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:22)
My guest today is Alyssa Ravasio, Co-Founder and CEO of Hipcamp, a platform to discover and book your next camping trip.
I was excited for this conversation as it combines two of my favorite passions, the outdoors and entrepreneurship. In our discussion, we cover how Alyssa bootstrapped demand in the early days of Hipcamp, the importance of creating not just great experiences, but magical ones and the evolution of Hipcamp's business model. After listening to this episode, I'm sure the first thing you'll want to do is get outside in nature. Please enjoy my conversation with Alyssa Ravasio.
So Alyssa, I think we need to start at the beginning. This is one I've been looking forward to because it unites probably my two top passions, the technology software marketplace world and the outdoors. So I've been dying to talk to you about what you're building at Hipcamp. I'd love to hear the kernel of original insight that led you to start this business as a place to jump off.

**Alyssa Ravasio** (3:14)
Sure, and thanks for having me, Patrick.
There were a couple important kernels. It's kind of a company that's evolved pretty organically over the years. So the original kernel for Hipcamp really came as the result of unsurprisingly a camping trip gone slightly awry.
I was very fortunate. I got to grow up spending lots of time camping with my little sisters and my parents and my friends. And it was always just this huge part of my life and really a lot of what I looked forward to and loved most about growing up. What catalyzed Hipcamp was for my then boyfriend, now husband, who's from Australia. And I wanted to show him the beauty of California's coast until I was like, you know what, I'm going to figure this camping thing out. I normally just go with my friends who do the hard work, but I'm going to do the hard work. I'm going to find the campsite and take him on this trip.
And I just could not believe how broken and hard the process was. I almost gave up five different times in the process. I crashed my Chrome browser because there were too many different tabs for state parks and county parks and private parks and federal parks. It was a total mess, but I persevered and finally found a campsite at a state park called Andrew Malera. I didn't take reservations, which was good news, because I took one look at the reservation website and was not willing to go there. We ended up driving down on New Year's Eve for 2013, got to the campground, it was a beautiful spot. We got the last site actually at the campground, so we were pretty lucky. But when I walked up to the campground, everybody else at the campground, seriously, almost every single other campsite had surfboards, wetsuits, all this surfing gear. And we walked out to the beach and it turned out there was an incredible wave, beautiful point break, so really well formed barreling right in front of the campground.