We launched in April 2020, so middle of the pandemic.
The whole travel industry ground to a halt.
We had this huge network of these local experts who were all out of work
and they were coming to us for help.
These were the people that feed
some of the most amazing travel agencies in the world.
And we wanted to give them the voice, so we created Elsewhere,
which is essentially a marketplace that's connecting travelers directly to these people.
My co-founder and I have worked in the industry each for over a decade.
We love the industry, we love travel.
There's so many amazing things about it.
But there's a lot of things that we wanted to change.
We are a bootstrapping business.
We are really a kitchen table startup that started with very few resources.
We really relied on free software to build and create our brand. We knew that
we wanted to reinvent travel, and we needed to do so with a really clean and modern aesthetic.
And we have no design background, and without money and any design background at all,
we needed a software that could hold our hand and get us there.
And Canva totally did that.
Travel is a life-changing experience.
I've been traveling since I was really young.
I took my first solo trip was 13, and I think that the more people
travel, the better the world can be.
I'm Alexis.
I'm one of the founders of Elsewhere, along with Craig.
Elsewhere's mission is to make better travel,
both for the destinations and for travelers themselves.