Startup Guidehop.com thinks the answer to finding the best local mountain bike trails or Texas brewery tours is in your backyard.
The Dallas-based peer-to-peer online marketplace lets people give and book tours and guided activities to each other.
The site can turn anyone with knowledge of a place or a hobby into a tour guide. Users can search the site by city — from your hometown to your next vacation destination — to learn what’s going on.
The booming peer-to-peer Internet space includes startups Airbnb , which lets users book vacations in other people’s homes, and Kickstarter, a peer-to-peer funding site. One distinguishing factor is that Guidehop helps people connect to expand their real-life experiences.
Former Dallas Cowboys player Darren Woodson and four others started Guidehop in November. He considers himself a rookie in the tech startup world.
“The hardest thing about it is that my passion is Guidehop, but football is something I’ve done since I was 7 years old,” said Woodson, who is both an angel investor and an NFL analyst for ESPN. “At this point in my life, I want to get involved in technology and do something different besides football.”
Guidehop co-founder and chief executive Ryan Schmitz got the idea for Guidehop a year ago after a bad travel experience. He wanted to backpack the Trans-Zion Trek, a 47-mile hike in southern Utah, but didn’t have a buddy and couldn’t find a guide. Someone answered an ad he posted on Craigslist, but the person was so inexperienced that they never went on the hike, he said.
“It was an absolute nightmare,” said Schmitz, who lives in Connecticut. “I said there’s got to be a better way.”
Schmitz met Woodson and Jeremy Roberts of Dallas while involved with another startup a couple of years ago. They came together again — with Tait Grove and Jeff Louden — to develop Guidehop.
Guidehop has about 1,000 activities for sale, ranging from a haunted house tour in McKinney to a tour of the 2012 Summer Olympic sites in London. Prices range from $5 to $600 for a group.
Even Guidehop’s founders offer tours, such as Roberts’ two-hour tour of backyard chicken coops in McKinney for $10 a person. Woodson once led a tour of Cowboys Stadium.
Guidehop is focused on Dallas, Austin and Chicago, but plans to add other cities, Schmitz said. For each booked tour, Guidehop charges a 3 percent processing fee to the guide and a fee of $5 or 15 percent of the tour price to the consumer.
Bookings have grown 20 percent each month since November, Schmitz said. If that growth continues, Guidehop can be cash-flow positive in 18 months.
Woodson, Schmitz and a few other investors initially funded the company with about $120,000. Now Guidehop is trying to raise about $1.5 million from angel investors or a strategic partner.
“The space is heating up,” said Roberts, an executive recruiter and social media marketer. SideTour, a rival focused on New York, raised $1.5 million in October. Last summer, Airbnb raised $112 million in venture capital.
Brad Hunstable, founder and president of San Francisco-based broadcast platform Ustream Inc., said he plans to invest in Guidehop in its current fundraising round. Last month, he joined Guidehop’s advisory board.
“I believe in the product and the idea,” Hunstable said. “There are a lot of people out there who want to share their knowledge and passion.”
Guidehop also fulfills Hunstable’s mission to help to build a thriving startup ecosystem in North Texas.
“I’m interested in helping Dallas-based companies stay in Dallas, and the way that I can do that is to leverage my knowledge and experience in the Internet world in San Francisco,” said Hunstable, a Granbury native who splits his time between San Francisco and the Fort Worth area.
