Travellerspoint was founded in 2002 by two brothers, Sam and Peter Daams. These two young men did not let geographical distance get in the way of entrepreneurship and so Travellerspoint was born. They exemplify the piece of advice that entrepreneurs should do what they are passionate about. Read more about what they are all about at their custom-made blog here.

You defined Travellerspoint’s goal as “create an international meeting point for travelers worldwide to stay in touch or find the people they have met on their past travels.” What challenges have Travellerspoint faced to achieve this goal?

When we first started out, the biggest challenge we faced is in growing the size of our community to make this a worthwhile endeavor. Travellerspoint was a place where travellers could reunite. But to make that work, we needed to build up our community of travellers and increase traffic to our site - SEO made that possible.

I see that you have two physical offices, one in Norway the other in Australia, how big is your team worldwide?

We have three full-time people in Australia, including my brother Peter, the co-founder, and a "freelancer." In Norway, there is just me.

We have one who freelances in the Netherlands, although he was pretty much fulltime for the whole of 2006. In addition, we have 7 moderators who monitor our forums and photo gallery.

We’ve taken a user-centric approach and have allowed certain members on Travellerspoint to flag posts as spam-related if they see fit and we’ve gotten several contributors there.

Back in 2002, when Travellerspoint just got started, you mentioned attracting thousands of new members. What was the reason Travellerspoint was able to grow at such a rapid rate? What or who was your method of distribution?

When we first started out, we spent countless hours sending out emails to websites and companies we thought could help us put the word out. Being financially-strapped which is common in most startups, we had to rely on our biggest assets of time and passion to get Travellerspoint off the ground.

We kind of filled a niche market at the time and because of it and our persistence, we were able to get media coverage with companies like Lonely Planet and BBC World, featuring coverage in Lonely Planet’s “On the Road” and BBC World’s “Click Online” section.

We later came to realize that we were going about this the wrong way and there were better ways to attract members to our site through popular search engines like Google and Yahoo. So we taught ourselves a little SEO.

Elsewhere, in about 4 to 5 months into the project, we came across the “Database of Travel Helpers”, a personal project started by Manuel Montenegro. He had contacted us with the the message that the service was too intensive for him to handle and so we offered to keep it running in exchange for making it a Travellerspoint service. And so we made some improvements and integrated it as a service to Travellerspoint.

In short, the countless hours emailing media/news agencies, SEO learning, and the “Database of Travel Helpers” integration, really helped to generate interest quickly and enable us to grow at a rapid rate.

From your blog it looks like the team has a pretty envious work life-style traveling to places like Panama, Osaka, and Bangalore just to name a few. How does Travellerspoint go about getting its revenue to support all these desirable adventures?

To answer this question, let me first start off by saying that at Travellerspoint, we also host our member's Travellerspoint blogs so all the trips you read about on our blog were probably our member's trips.

Our revenue comes from advertising and partner programs (affiliate programs). Google adsense is one of them. However, we have had better income streams through advertisement sales.

We only sell travel-related products on our site through affiliate partners and we had made it a principle to only sell products that we ourselves are comfortable with purchasing.

We operate on a strict policy where every advertiser has a limit to the number of pages they can display and by doing this, it enables advertisers to stay with us for longer periods of time. We hope that because of this type of quality control, users continue coming back to our site.

As for those traveling to the places that Travellerspoint talks about is a mere coincidence. *grin*

On a final note, what kind of new features/services can we expect to come out of Travellerspoint in the next few years?

We have a couple of new projects lined up for this year that we hope will increase the usability of our site.

We have plans to implement a better way of ranking activity on the site, making sure that it is easier for travellers to find information, continued development of our custom-made blogging platform and forums, and reviews functionality in the accommodation area with better designation guides.

One of the things we are cooking up in the kitchen is we are working on improving our travel maps feature. Please go here to find out more.

This will raise a never-ending battle against spammers and advertisers trying to use the site to promote their own services so we hope to grow our community of moderators to help with the quality control over time as we strive to improve the features and services for the community.