Roscoe Price Moor, founder of travel app Roady, was inspired by Pokemon Go's ability to get people outdoors, but wanted to make an app for travel experiences instead.
Roscoe Price Moor, founder of travel app Roady, was inspired by Pokemon Go's ability to get people outdoors, but wanted to make an app for travel experiences instead.
Roscoe Price Moor, founder of travel app Roady, talks to Tom Raynel about working with local tourism operators, and the business’ growth thanks to the ease of lockdowns.
What is Roady?
Roady is a travel app we launched in mid-2022 that helps people find epic experiences and plan road tripsaround New Zealand.
What inspired you to start the business?
We started as a travel media company doing a lot of work around New Zealand, working with tourism boards and filming free as well as paid experiences, hikes, waterfalls, hidden gems, tourism operators, that sort of thing. In doing that, we built up this big audience of people interested in New Zealand travel.
It got to a point where we’re like, this is great, we’re giving people this great content and they’re clearly using it to plan their travel. But we wanted to take it a step further from social media and build a platform where people can find these places, add them to their bucket list itineraries, and tick them off.
I had no coding experience myself, just the idea, which was inspired by Pokemon Go. We noticed people were getting out of the house, getting addicted to this thing going and ticking off these Pokemon around New Zealand. I thought, imagine if that was travel experiences rather than these digital monsters.
Roady works with tourism operators and tourism boards, including the likes of Destination Queenstown, to develop exciting campaigns that show off tourism opportunities to their two million-plus social media followers.
How do you earn revenue, and do you work with tourism operators?
So the app’s revenue comes from a few sources. It’s essentially a subscription app, you can pay a monthly or yearly subscription as a traveller. On top of that, you can book cars and campervan experiences where we clip the ticket. We work with some key partners in the space, including Juicy, THL and Mad Campers. You can pretty much book any tourism experience as well, like skydiving or white water rafting, through the app.
We’ve got the app and then we’ve got a team of in-house content creators who are on the road monthly working with mainly the tourism boards. For example, we might go down and work with Destination Queenstown and they commission us to do a five-day shoot and we shoot whatever they want to put on for us, which would be tourism operators, hikes, wineries, etc.
All the social media stuff is essentially the top of our funnel, we reach about two million unique accounts every month organically.
Who uses the app?
After we came out of lockdown we had a bunch of Kiwis jump on it straight away and it’s really just grown and taken off from there at the time of launching. Now there are a lot more internationals back in the country, we’re seeing a lot more usage on the platform.
At the moment, we’re pretty bang on 50/50 between domestic and international users. The international users are really thrashing it when they’re here. They’re having six or seven sessions a day, they’re out on the road, they’re on holiday so they’re looking constantly for things to do while they’re driving that base.
The Kiwis are more weekend warriors. So thinking what are they going to do this weekend, getting out and about or using it when they do go away. Yeah, quite different styles of use but both are important definitely.
The Roady app works on a subscription model, allowing users to connect with transport providers, tourism operators and more to plan the ultimate road trip, all while getting out and experiencing what New Zealand and now Australia has to offer.
I understand you’ve recently launched in Australia?
It was a tough decision initially. I thought, do we just sort of launch the app now as is, or do we wait until it’s perfect, and we very much went let’s get it live and build from there. In New Zealand, we’ve got about 1000 pins on our map for points of interest, which is pretty good saturation around the country. Obviously, Australia is a lot bigger.
We’ve initially launched in just New South Wales and Queensland and that’s where we’ve focused at the moment. We’ve got about 250 pins in those two states, which is not a bad spread along the east coast. They’ve got a goal of growing to 450 by Christmas. We’ve got five well-travelled photographers who are Australian-based, and they’re helping us with the population by putting all the best experiences on the app over this past year.
The goal is really to build the presence for what we’re doing over there, get it populated with all these great spots and then we’ll start to see some movement.
What are the key ingredients in planning a road trip?
I think just being able to go with the flow is a key ingredient. I like to plan and to know what spots I’m gonna tick off, but I think ultimately you want people with you who are having to roll with the punches because it never goes quite to plan. I like people who are yes men – who say yes to everything. We’re happy to get up at 5am to climb to the top of a mountain to see the sunrise. I’m definitely an active relaxer when I go away as well.
Roady works with transport operators like Juicy Vans, THL campervans and Mad Campers to set travellers up with the transport they need all in one app.
What would be your advice to other budding entrepreneurs?
One thing I always come back to is you have to learn to love losing. You get so many “no”s starting a business and you get so many people who doubt your idea or, you know, you’re reaching out to businesses all the time trying to work with them. You’ve got to get comfortable with getting told no. I guess learn from your mistakes and take action, I think inaction is probably the biggest thing that stops people.
Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business and retail.
