Most holidays end with a camera roll, a sunburn and a solemn promise to answer the group chat. Nick Poggi came home from Europe with a company to build. He, Lauren Schneider and several friends had tried to arrange a two-week vacation for young professionals. The available group tours did not quite fit. So, while traveling, Poggi and Schneider began mapping the service they had wanted to buy.
The irritation was ordinary. Coordinating people, dates, tastes, rooms and money is where democratic enthusiasm goes to perish. The response was more unusual. In 2017, Poggi, Schneider and technologist Brandon Denham founded TrovaTrip in Portland. Their first trip left for Italy in April 2018; two journeys to Portugal followed. What began as a better way to organize a holiday gradually became a marketplace for community-led travel.
TrovaTrip now places three groups around the same imaginary table. Hosts, often creators or other community leaders, invite an audience. Travelers book a place. Local operators design the itinerary, supply guides and run the experience on the ground. TrovaTrip handles much of the administrative wilderness in between: trip pages, payments, communications, customer support and preparation. The company’s current figures are 33,000 travelers, 2,300 trips and 2,000 hosts.
TrovaTrip supplies the connective tissue: technology, payments, support and preparation.
The spreadsheet before the passport
Poggi’s path into travel ran through numbers. At the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business, he studied honors business with concentrations in finance and marketing. He worked with the student-run UO Investment Group, then moved into capital-markets research at Fisher Investments. The early résumé is not scented with sunscreen. It is the résumé of someone trained to look at incentives, evidence and return.
He soon shifted toward software. In 2013 he co-founded Crowd Surf, a group messaging and planning app. The name now feels like a faint pencil sketch of what came later: another effort to help people coordinate. At referral-marketing company Extole, Poggi managed data insights. He then became a senior manager of analytics and strategy at Aura, a machine-learning startup.
Recommendations from his Extole years reveal more than the titles do. Colleagues remembered a manager who did not stop at launching a feature. He measured whether it worked, turned useful findings into repeatable plans and abandoned ideas when the evidence said to pivot. One praised an ROI calculator he built for the sales team. Another offered a memorable tribute to an analyst: his spreadsheets were described as “truly magical if not astutely scientific.” It is a wonderfully serious compliment with just enough sorcery.
That combination of finance, measurement and product thinking traveled neatly into TrovaTrip. A hosted journey may look effortless in the photographs, but it is a live performance built on deposits, cancellation rules, supplier agreements, customer questions and airport clocks. The romance needs plumbing. Poggi’s contribution has been to treat the plumbing as a product.
A host, not a tour operator
The decisive change to TrovaTrip’s early concept was recognizing that creators should not have to become travel agents. They already possessed something difficult to manufacture: attention with a history. A cooking teacher, photographer, outdoor expert or online personality had gathered people around a shared interest. Some followers wanted more than another post. They wanted to go somewhere together.
“Rather than us selling these experiences directly to customers, we thought let’s build a platform that makes it easy for creators to offer and host experiences with their communities,” Poggi explained when the company announced its Series A. The distinction gave each party a sensible job. A host would convene. An operator would operate. TrovaTrip would make the handoff legible.
“We only succeed when the entire ecosystem succeeds.”Nick Poggi on TrovaTrip’s revenue model
The money followed the division of labor. TrovaTrip has said that local trip operators typically receive about 60 percent of trip revenue. Hosts average more than 20 percent, depending in part on the price they set. TrovaTrip retains roughly 15 to 20 percent for the platform, support, vetting, trip preparation, operational work and safety systems. Exact shares vary, but the hierarchy is revealing. The people delivering the physical experience receive the largest portion.
How a typical trip’s revenue is shared
Indicative averages disclosed by TrovaTrip. Host earnings and trip economics vary.
It is easy to call this the creator economy and leave the phrase to do all the work. Poggi’s model is more physical than that label suggests. A follower becomes a traveler. A comment thread becomes a breakfast table. The creator’s role changes from broadcaster to host, while someone local must still know which road the bus can take. The internet supplies the affinity. The trip tests whether that affinity can survive an early wake-up call.
Twenty-six trips, then stillness
By early 2020, TrovaTrip had operated only 26 trips. Then global travel stopped. For an established airline, the shutdown was a crisis. For a young marketplace still proving its shape, it threatened the premise itself. Yet creators working with the company kept making a counterargument: people would need connection when travel returned, perhaps more urgently than before.
TrovaTrip kept building. The company later described tenfold booking growth in 2021. It raised $5 million that year, followed by a $15 million Series A led by Madrona in September 2022, with Pioneer Square Labs, Oregon Venture Fund, Elevate Capital and Portland Seed Fund participating. In 2023, TrovaTrip ranked No. 236 on the Inc. 5000.
Growth also forced the founders to surrender their collection of early-stage hats. Schneider has recalled that she and Poggi once handled bookkeeping, customer service, business development, trip coordination and product requirements, and even guided trips. By 2023 she said TrovaTrip had more than 100 employees. An organization had taken the place of two people repeatedly asking, “Who has the confirmation number?”
Poggi’s public writing has stayed close to product design. With “Trova Unlocked,” the company made its audience survey a planning tool rather than an automatic gate. Earlier, hosts generally needed at least 100 responses before launching, because the data suggested that threshold predicted demand. The rule worked for creators with large online followings but could hinder a yoga studio, coach, artist or small business with a compact community. The update kept measurement while allowing judgment. That is a mature analyst’s compromise: respect the signal without worshipping the form.
Access is an operating decision
TrovaTrip’s language often returns to making travel easier, safer and more accessible. In 2022, employee Nadia Garver noticed a stubborn gap. The company could simplify the mechanics of travel, but every traveler still needed the money to go. She remembered missing school field trips that her family could not afford and proposed a scholarship.
Poggi set aside a $20,000 budget for the first program. A nine-person employee committee received more than 300 applications, interviewed finalists and selected five people for international journeys in 2023. The program returned in 2024, and Poggi promoted its third edition in 2025, publicly thanking Garver for the original idea. It is a small but useful portrait of his leadership: an employee supplied the observation, a team designed the program and the chief executive supplied resources and credit.
That story also sharpens the limits of the startup’s mission. Software can remove forms and friction. It cannot make every passport equally affordable. Accessibility becomes credible through choices about pricing, support, scholarships and who receives the economic benefit. A slogan floats. A budget lands.
The destination is a relationship
Poggi is not a highly theatrical founder. The public record presents an operator more interested in the system than in personal mythology. He speaks about complementary skills, local expertise, creator income and the health of the ecosystem. His earlier colleagues describe someone who measures, standardizes and pivots. Even the origin story begins with a group problem rather than a solitary revelation.
The aspiration, however, is unabashedly human. Poggi has argued that travel shapes perspective and brings people closer through encounters with unfamiliar cultures. TrovaTrip’s present mission is to help people find their community everywhere in the world. The phrasing contains a lovely paradox: community is usually what one leaves behind when traveling. His business depends on the possibility that it may also be what one goes out to meet.
The cleverness of TrovaTrip is therefore not that it discovered people enjoy holidays. The brochures had noticed. It recognized a stranded form of trust. Creators had communities that gathered online. Operators had local knowledge and itineraries. Travelers wanted companionship without taking on the full burden of organizing strangers. Poggi and his co-founders built a structure through which each could borrow confidence from the others.
Behind every graceful group photograph sits an unphotogenic stack of work: vetting, payments, support messages, waivers, room lists and contingency plans. Poggi’s career prepared him for that stack. The finance graduate learned software; the analyst learned marketplaces; the reluctant group planner learned that belonging can be operationalized, though never automated completely.
A trip still depends on weather, timing and the disposition of the person in the next seat. No platform can eliminate the splendid risk of other people. It can only make the introduction, clear the path and hope everyone remembers the confirmation number. For Nick Poggi, that has proved a large enough job.