Polarsteps' Clare Jones on a Privacy-First Travel App

If you're a founder, travel tech investor or app creator driven to build the next generation travel app, here's the challenge. The market is crowded. User expect more than just geotracking. They want an all in one travel platform that lets them plan, track and relive their journeys.

Enter Claire Jones, the new CEO of Polar Steps who helped scale what three words? And now leads Amsterdam's first fastest growing travel tech startup towards tens of millions of users. Today we're diving into how she's marrying AI, travel planner, global growth and authentic travel stories to redefine the digital travel experience. Welcome to StartUpLead IO, your podcast and YouTube blog covering the German startup scene with news, interviews and live events.

Hello and welcome everybody to Startupgrade IO. Our guest today is someone who combines tech scale, ambition, travel passion and deep startup experience. Meet Claire Jones, British born, a recognized leader in the European startup ecosystem, Former Chief Commercial officer at what3words? And now CEO of Amsterdam based Polar Steps.

Under her leadership since June 2024, Polar Steps has surged from 10 million user towards 18 million plus users, making it one of Europe's most exciting travel apps. But what makes this story compelling isn't just the growth numbers. It's the mission to build a single tool for travelers. Planning, planning, tracking and reliving of journeys.

Powered by AI, grounded in storytelling and rooted in mindful, responsible travel. Over the next 60 minutes or so, we'll peel back how Claire is doing it. The growth tactics, the product pivots, the cultural foundations and what that means for any founder building in consumer tech today. Let's dive in.

And this sounds a little bit strange because we recording this very well ahead of time, but you're the first episode in 2026, so happy new Year everyone. Claire, welcome, welcome. Happy New Year. Happy New Year.

Claire. Let's start with your journey. You helped build what three words into global recognized scale up before taking the helmet. Polar Steps, what personal insights or story drew you from geocoding to redefining travel?

Yeah, so I guess they're both about moving people, moving people around. What three words was about helping people and things get to the places they were meant to be. But I think for me, a big part of it was actually my personal experience of travel at what three words? Because I used to travel all the time for work.

I spent loads of time in Asia, I spent loads of time in the us, all over Europe. And it was pretty exhausting at various points because business travel is never as glamorous as it sounds. And there was a moment part way through where I was really done with it. I was completely exhausted and I was just not enjoying it.

And it was because I basically lost my curiosity at the beginning of traveling, when I was in my kind of twenties and I was traveling for what, three words. I loved going to every place. I would go to Kuwait and I'd be like, I can't believe I'm in Kuwait for work. How amazing, how lucky I am.

And then once you've traveled non stop for about eight years, you sort of lose the joy of it. And it was only probably three years ago that I rediscovered that joy post Covid going with colleagues who reminded me that travel is about curiosity and learning about yourself and having adventures and not just showing up in a place. And that was really quite transformative for me. It made me love my travel life again.

I made it my mission to everywhere I went, explore something, discover something and have an adventure, even if it was just one day of adventure. And that really helped me. And so then when I met the team at Polar Steps, so much of Polar Steps is about curiosity and adventure and that travel can really transform us as individuals. And that was actually my exact experience I'd had.

It was work travel. It wasn't adventuring in the same way most of our users are in Polar Steps. But it really for me was quite a transformative experience of travel, opening my heart and opening my mind. And so I loved the idea of actually being part of that on a broader scale of how we can help people explore the world with curiosity and open mindedness.

Being a management consultant for over a decade, I totally know how this feels. If you enjoy the idea to travel abroad on other continents for business, it kind of loses its joy when you have to sleep for like the third time in Chicago o' Hare because there's a snowstorm coming in or something like that. Yeah, I've. I've been there too many times.

Polar Steps began as a sailor's idea in the middle of the Atlantic and has become one of Europe's most downloaded travel apps. How does that origin story still shape the company's culture and vision under your leadership? Yeah, it's a great question. So I think a really important thing is because it was founded by travelers.

So Nick, who is the traveler who was on the boat and three others, it was founded by travelers who have adventure in their heart. And so the way that the company has that adventurous spirit running through, and that's both from a kind of product design perspective, it's from the world. We want to create a world that celebrates adventure, that Celebrates that journeys are sometimes the downs as well as the ups that, you know, whether you're sailing on a boat across the Atlantic or for you, your version of that might be just visiting somewhere a little further away from home on your own than you're used to.

We all have our different versions of adventure. That spirit of it remains very, very strong in the company, in the product. You can see it. You know, we showcase a lot of our users have.

We've got a big group of users who have public trips on percept. And so we showcase users who have the kinds of adventures that we want to help share with the world, which are often. They might be. They might.

Some of them might be epic. Some of them might be someone who, you know, kayak was kayaking across the whole of Europe, maybe, or it might be somebody who is doing slow, sustainable travel and wanting to share that with the world. And so the spirit of adventure is there in the product. It's there in the culture of the company as well.

It's a really, really important thing. And, yes, it wasn't born in a boardroom. It was born in the middle of the Atlantic. And that's something that Polar Steps is really very true to today.

Admittedly, my biggest adventure is currently getting two boys in time in the kindergarten. It's not necessarily what you guys will be sharing. It's an adventure, too. It's an adventure of its own kind.

And I've done. Actually, some of my favorite adventures myself have been my two little nieces who don't fl. They like to get the train everywhere for climate reasons. And so we.

I actually took my two little meters up a mountain once in Austria, and it was one of the most beautiful adventures, even though it wasn't the same as backpacking around Asia, for me and for them, it was a pretty beautiful adventure. Mm. The usual complaints. Are we there yet?

My feet are hurting. If you're taking them up on a little. The most beautiful bit of the trip was going up through the clouds on a gondola. And they.

Because they don't fly, they don't know what it looks like to see the world from above the cloud. So that was actually extraordinary. And then didn't have any complaints from them about feet hurting or are we there yet? Because they got to go up through the clouds on a gondola and see the world from above.

I see before you joined, the travel market was fragmented. Planning, tracking, and sharing all lived like in separate silos. What gap did you see and how did that insight shape your product? Roadmap when you stepped in SEO.

Yeah. So I think the gap is obvious to anyone who's a traveler, which is, I don't want to be moving between 10 different apps and 100 different browser tabs and a Google spreadsheet when I'm planning my trip. And when I'm on the trip, I don't want to have to text everybody separately when they're saying whatsapping me, saying, how's your trip going? Plus posting something on Instagram, and where am I keeping my diary and my journal of the trip?

And how am I going to remember this for that of my life? So that fragmented experience you mentioned is exactly the gap. So there is space for a seamless experience where you can have one app that is with you from your daydreaming through the. Through the planning, through the adventure itself, through to remembering it for the rest of your life.

It's the thing you can whip out when someone goes, have you been to Japan? What should I do in Tokyo? And you can be like, oh, let me show you. Let me show you what I did.

Let me share that with you, and use it to help inspire other people, too. So I think that is clear. And there's also a big space right now for authentic travel stories, because we see with social media, and it wasn't the intention of social media, but we see this. And even with LLMs, we're seeing a lot of things being said about travel that are not necessarily authentic, that are geared towards particular types of stories, particular types of people.

And I think there's a big space in the market right now for something that acknowledges the difference between people, that we have very different motivations, we have very different things that give us joy when we're traveling and also helps us travel in line with our own values, which is something that I think has been missing a little in some of the design of some of the things we've seen in this travel space in the past. When you've been speaking about that, what came to mind is this body of a private jet where you can.

That you can rent for a few minutes or an hour and pretend to. You flying private. Yeah, that. That's the unauthentic pieces.

I know where you're going. When. When you joined in mid-2024, when Polar Steps just had 10 million users, within a year, it's nearing 18 million. What was the first big decision you made that unlocked this acceleration?

Yeah, great question. I mean, was it podcast advertising? Yeah, I'd like to say it was podcast advertising, but unfortunately, no. Yeah.

So it's. The key thing is it actually wasn't really anything to do with me because the way these things work is they are. They look like they're growing slowly and then they look like they grew really suddenly. And it actually did go inside around about when I joined, but it was not to do with.

That was written in the numbers already. It was about to happen, which is this acceleration. And because it had basically overspilled from the Netherlands. So Polar Steps is incredibly well known in the Netherlands.

It's on a third of people's phones here. People love it, they're very proud of Polar Steps and it's a normal part of everyday life. When someone goes on your trip, people back, remember to update your protosteps. And it had already overspilled a bit.

So I joined because I joined just before the summer. The summer is our really big peak season when you see loads and loads of people going on their adventures and sharing them with friends. So Polar Steps usage goes up and so we're. It did happen that I joined in just before the summer last year and then we had this next peak, which was due anyway.

The first big decision I made in collaboration with the team and our amazing head of growth and marketing, Laurens, was really about focusing on France. So we had organic growth. We actually still have organic growth in loads and loads of markets. You look at the numbers and you can see every day people in so many countries around the world using it.

But what you have to do, if you're going to try and really get this to spread the way it did in the Netherlands, you've got to pick a market. So France was a really interesting choice for us because it was already very, very. It was moving, had this really lovely organic growth, but so did Germany, so did the UK to some extent. Even so did the US then.

But we had to decide which one. And I think we could see in some of the metrics that France had already started to behave differently. So you could see retention was different, you could see that the follower numbers were different. So things that were already signs to us that France was about to hit that escape velocity.

And our theory was if we invest in some marketing, we might be able to speed up that escape velocity moment. We might be able to pull that forward by two years or three years or something like. And so the first big decision in the marketing side of things was, let's focus on France. And the lovely thing is that's been incredibly effective.

It was really. I think it was in various points in the summer Number one travel app in France, which is an extraordinary thing to see. And everywhere I was going and meeting French people, they'd be saying, oh, yes, I use polar steps, or my friends just sent me a polar steps link. So it was really lovely to see the effect of that.

But, yeah, that's always one of the hard things is you've got to pick. You can't do everything at once. You have unlimited time and unlimited resource. And so for us, choosing France luckily turned out to be a good decision.

But that was one of our first decisions of how to do this next phase of the company. I would be a little bit more interested right now. Are there preferred destinations per country? Do people from the Netherland Netherlands travel to different places than Germans than French do?

This is a great question. And this actually is partly the reason that it had this overflow effect from the Netherlands, because Dutch people go to the same places as German and French people and Belgians and Swiss people. So we have this lovely overspill, which is that French. So, for example, you might find that a Dutch young person on a backpacking trip would meet a French young person on a backpacking trip in a hostel in Thailand and they would tell them about polar steps.

And so you would have the discovery moment in a hostel in Thailand from a Dutch person telling a French person. And so, yes, actually you see some similarities between the places they go, particularly internationally. So you see a lot of similarities about the places in Latin America, the places in Asia, sometimes places in North America that people go from Europe. You do see differences within countries, though.

So, for example, with France, we see a lot of people actually using it for domestic travel. So France, of course. And of course it makes sense because in the Netherlands, domestic travel is limited to the size of the Netherlands. It's not the biggest country, whereas in France you've got a lot of different places you can go.

So one of the lovely things we've seen in the last kind of six months is French people just using polar steps when traveling within France. So they're using it to go on their road trips. They're going. And they might be going camping in the summer, they might be exploring on their bikes and they're sharing their trips on polar steps, which are just trips within France.

So that's been an interesting difference. And then, as we've seen the US pick up, we're seeing the same thing in the us. So a lot of our US travellers, they might discover polar steps because they met a European traveler or they traveled to Europe or Asia, but often within the US they'll be tracking trips to see the national parks at weekends. They might be doing short domestic trips rather than just seeing it being used internationally.

The US is huge and people discover the US and explore the US all the time. So we're seeing domestic travel as a really big increasing trend within perception. I see. I see.

As many leaders struggle to balance the product focus and team alignment during hypergrowth. How did you approach reorganizing polar steps, teams and prioritize to support to scale sustainably? Yeah, so, I mean, the lovely thing which happened when I came in is I discovered how beautifully set up everything was for scale. So Sasha, who's our amazing head of people and ops and her team had done so much of the hard work of thinking about scale already.

So I actually didn't have to change anything. Actually, my main job on the cultural side at the beginning was to listen and to understand why it was working so well. Because so much of it was working so well. It was really interesting to me because it was a very small team at that point, but it behaved already like a much bigger one because Sasha had put so much prep and thought into how will this work at scale.

The onboarding was already streets ahead of where it should have been for a 30, 40 person company. The interview process, the hiring process, the kind of the way you communicate your goals and your strategy. So I actually didn't have to change a lot of those things. I think the thing that I was trying to bring the focus on was over communication as, as the team got bigger, because as I came in, it was just coinciding with the growth moment where we were hiring a lot more people.

So it'd been very small for a very long time, doing huge amounts with very small amounts of resource. Then I was saying, as we're growing, communication just matters so much more. And it matters that you have to over communicate. You have to say things again and again and again because if you just say it once, as you get bigger, someone's on holiday, someone's sick, they don't hear it.

You're not all sitting around a table. You've got people on different. In our case, we've got people on different floors in an office. They come on on different days.

And so a big thing I've been trying to focus on while we're scaling is over communicate. Communicate things over and over again, say them over and over again. Sometimes in writing, sometimes in person, put it in slack, put it in notion, say it in a town hall, all of those sorts of things to Try and make sure that people hear the messages. But in terms of structure, that was all there.

It was in really, really great shape. I was very lucky. I got to inherit something that was working so beautifully. You're travel tech startup and travel tech is intensely competitive.

What's been the hardest strategic trade off you faced and how did you decide what not to do? Yes, great question. So one of the interesting things is travel is one of the best spaces for subscription. So if you look at premium apps, travel does really well as a category.

It's a place where people are willing to spend a lot of money. It's a very high emotion time in your life when you're traveling. So it's also a very high spend time. So if you think about what people save up for, travel is often one of the biggest things they save up for to be able to spend on.

So there's a willingness to pay. Now, Polar Steps is currently a free app. Now there is a very interesting option here which is we could have launched subscription last year or this year and had that kind of freemium approach. We have so many choices at Polar Steps of what we do.

And an example of a very tough strategic decision is when do you do subscription? So right now, if you look at the travel space, you look at the research, subscription is really effective in travel. People are willing to spend money when they're traveling. They're willing to spend money on tools that will help them.

And we could at Polar Steps have launched this subscription service last year. We could have launched it this year and we've decided not to. A lot of competitive apps, so we don't really have one competitor, but we have lots of apps that have competitive bits. A lot of them are doing premium models because it's a way to make a lot of money.

At Polar Steps, we're not interested in making a lot of money this year or next year. We're actually very healthy financially. So luckily we don't have to choose. But what we're much more interested in is building something that is amazing for the user and that has huge consumer growth.

And in that case, we decided not to do things like launch subscription last year or this year because though instead we want to focus on building amazing features that delight and surprise all of our users, not a tiny subset of users who are paying. We wanted to build things that make people excited all over the world in all these different countries, while we're hitting this really big user growth curve. So that was a big decision for us because of course, at any moment you could have gone.

We could make a lot of money right now by launching subscription, but we're not going to. And that's because we're all about user value. What's the thing we can do right now to create the best user experience? And still this year we've been building features to delight all of our users, rather than features to delight us.

Subset of them who are going to be paying. Now, over time, there will come a point where it makes absolute sense to launch subscription, because we've done the major features for the mass market and we'll be into niche ones. But our thing is always focus on the user first. What does the user want?

And right now, what we think the user wants is the features that we've been building, particularly in inspiration and planning. Those are quite new to us. Rather than building something for a subset of users that will make you a lot of money, that's not the focus for us. The latest AI powered planner has been a headline feature and a lot of people are now doing AI for the sake of AI.

How did he ensure this wasn't just another gimmick, but something that genuinely enhanced the traveler's experience? Yeah, so this is something we've spent so much time on because right now it's very easy to go to an LLM like chatgpt and just type in, plan me a trip to Italy, I'm going for a week. And the problem with that is the LLMs, the way that they're built is not about finding unique or authentic or off the beaten track experiences. What will happen is you'll all get sent to the same place.

You've seen this happen over and over again. You get very broad, very vague recommendations that send people to the same place. And even if you're really trying, people will have experience of this. If you're really trying to find really off the beaten track experiences that suit you, it's really difficult with an LLM because the LLMs are statistical models.

They're trying to help show the most likely thing that they think you want and therefore they're going to be sending everybody to the same places. So the difference here is instead of doing that, we do a couple of things. One is we take your personal travel history. So if you opt in.

So this is opt in only, but for people who want to use the AI feature, we take your personal travel history and we look at that, we say, who are you as a traveler? So in my case, it knows that I really, actually really love train travel. I'm a big fan of trains. I really like it when I can go on a train across Europe rather than flying over.

I like to go through and I like to stop on the way. And so when it plans a trip for me. So I actually got it to plan a trip for me in the US recently and it sent me on trains through the US and Canada to see all kinds of amazing nature spots and see beautiful. I love, you know, exploring and hiking and things like that.

And it's, it's planning its whole trip based on my preferences as an individual. So that's the first thing it finds you things as an individual. It doesn't treat you the same as everyone else. The other thing we do is in our build of the AI product we put our values of how we believe travel should be into that.

And that is about curiosity, but it's also about taking care of the places you go. And so we're trying to help people build journeys which are not just about getting on a plane, going to a place where the locals feel very sick of everybody and it's really over touristed and then coming home again. What we're trying to do is help people understand that there are so many ways to travel. And yeah, if you want to, you know, maybe for example, you, you're used to going to tourist hotspots because you want to feel safe.

Okay, we can help you find somewhere that gives you the safety and the feeling of exploration within with comfort. We can help you do that in a place where maybe the locals aren't saying please go home. This is thoroughly over touristed. You know, you want amazing art.

Okay, we can help you find that. So a lot of the difference here is rather than just giving generic recommendations that are very vague and very broad and that gets send everyone to the same place. We're saying who are you as an individual? And also how are there ways to travel that might be better for the world than what we've been doing so far?

You said in the past that the magic of Polar steps is turning memories into something that can, you can hold in your hands. The printed travel book, for example. Take us behind that idea. Why was preserving emotional memory just as important as scaling a digital app?

And we'll talk about this in our founders vault. Find the link down here in the show notes. We've been talking about scaling from the Netherlands outwards, especially into Germany and France. That requires some nuances, some cultural nuances.

What did you learn about travel behaviors that surprised you and how did it shape your localization playbook? Yeah, I mean so many people it's incredible as we expand that we learn different things. One of the things I've really enjoyed in the German market, actually, is that a lot of the users are really responding to the fact that Polar Steps is very private. So most of our users have their.

All of their trips are private. And you can choose between totally private, just for me. So you as an individual, you can choose family and friends. So Maybe it's your 3, 4, 5 favorite people in the world, or you can choose public.

And in Germany, we've seen that the users really respond to the fact that this is not broadcasting. So you're not sharing this with everybody. This is a very, very small select group and the privacy is really important. And that is something that has resonated.

I mean, it resonates with all our users, but in Germany, more, more, more than in other places. So we're hearing from users that they care about these. We also constantly have users getting in touch with ideas and actually coming out of Germany, you have. People might be requesting extra privacy features or ways to change things so that they have.

They can, can use those privacy features in a different way. So that's been one example and seeing how important privacy is. And that's great because for us, it's something we've always cared about. We've been.

The whole point of Polar Steps is that it is for you and your closest friends and family. This is not about getting there on Instagram and showing everyone in the world what you've done. This is about a really authentic experience for me in 10 years and maybe for the four or five people I love most in the world. So that's been really nice because it resonates really nicely in the, in the German market.

Whereas, yeah, when you look at, for example, the US As I mentioned earlier, we've seen huge differences in how people travel. Partly an example would be in. In Europe, we're really lucky that we have these massive vacations, right? We have holiday, so we can have advent adventures that last a month.

In the US you have 10 days to use for all of your adventures that year. So what you see in the US is really interesting. People might be planning trips, they might plan it around the Thanksgiving holiday. And so not only are they going to their parents for Thanksgiving, they're going to do a road trip on the way there and stop on two or three places on the way to try and combine the Thanksgiving holiday with the weekend with a bit of a vacation day.

And that leads to a very highly planned trip. So when you look at our planning Use planning in the US is really you're planning, I mean, sometimes to the hour, the level of planning that you're seeing people do in the app. And that is because in Europe, yeah, I might show up somewhere if I'm spending a month exploring, I don't need to plan everything to the hour, whereas if I've only got 10 vacation days to use in the whole year, I'm going to plan and behave really differently.

So that's been a really fun thing, is just seeing the app out there and seeing people use it for totally different things. And the resonance across all is it's people exploring, it's people having adventures. But the types of adventures are just so different across different markets from our audience. I'd like to know you listening and have you ever used a travel app that genuinely changed how you travel?

If you're one of polar steps, 80 million explorers, drop your story in the comments or Tag us on LinkedIn and we might feature you in the next week's highlight thread. We've been talking about user growth here and retention and virality of the holy grail of consumer apps. What are the keys uses, loops or behaviors that keep PolarSteps community coming back and even bring your friends along. Yeah.

So I think the first thing is the fact that it's staying very small in terms of that social network. So the fact that we are not saying to people, bring everyone. You can make sure everyone follows you on Polar Steps. What we're seeing is people bring their closest people.

It might be their best friend, their sister, their mum, sometimes, sometimes even their grandmother. And it's people that they really love that they may bring in to follow them on their trips. And so that's a really key part of it, because the reason that people come back is because they are coming back as a traveler themselves, because they want to track their trips, but also because they follow people that they love. And so even if I'm not on a trip, if I get a notification.

So one of my sisters did this amazing walk through Italy and when she was tracking on pillow steps, I would get. I would get so excited for every day. I knew she was going to do one update a day. And I would click that notification and I'd see what she'd been up to.

And that made me really happy and joyful, even though I wasn't even traveling. I was just consuming her content. But because it's somebody I loved very deeply and a really important thing. So in the design, in the way that we think about Polar Steps, this is not about trying to dilute that and say, get everyone you know to follow you or become a travel influencer.

This is really about keep it very real, keep it very small, keep it very authentic. So that's one reason and that's the reason that it works as an organic growth loop, because people bring their closest people with them. So they invite four or five people. They don't invite a thousand, they invite four or five people.

But because that is a very strong call to action, which is, hi best friend, come and follow my trip on polar stuff steps. Very strong call to action, which means the best friend probably does follow them. And then also every time they do an update, the best friend probably does click on the notification and open it up and read it. Which is why you get that retained behavior.

Because they're having a really positive experience as a follower and as a traveler. So you get that retained behavior. The other thing is also investing in long term decisions about product which are about the love of the user. So sometimes what you can do is you can pick a metric and you can be like, in the next three months we want to change this conversion rate that works for changing conversion rates.

What you sometimes miss with that is the longer term bets which are creating a beautiful user experience. Now that's really hard to measure in the short term. You can measure it in retention over three years, but it's very hard within a quarter to do that. And so a big thing we really care about internally is also taking big leaps, big leaps in design, big leaps in surprise and delight.

Features that may not affect the conversion rate now, but are a huge part of the reason that our users just come back. Our retention is, is extraordinary at prototypes. I've never seen anything like this in travel and that is because the users love it. And so part of our job is to keep investing in things that users are going to love rather than just the things that give you short term increases or improvements in retention or conversion.

As the CEO, you're not just building a product, you're building a brand. How do you keep a sense of purpose, mindful, sustainable travel alive inside a really fast growing organization? Yeah, yeah. So this is a lot of this is about the values.

So the values of the company have to be real and they have to be lived by people. And I think our company does a beautiful job of that. And actually one of our values is do good, be good. And I love that value because it's a really nice shorthand for when you're making a decision.

And if there's something where you're not quite sure what to do, but the deciding factor is, is this the right thing to do? Is this. Is this being good as a company? Is this being good as a person?

That's a really nice way to make a decision, a make a quick decision, because you're like, yes, is this in line with our values? So that's one way. The other way is that the company's also gone through this change moment with the founders bringing me in as CEO. So the founders staying in the company, but bringing me in a CEO.

And there was an important moment for them which was also, how do we keep the values, the things you've just mentioned, how do we keep them as the company goes through this change with bringing someone else in and also growing a lot and really expanding internationally and growing the team. And so what. What they did before I joined was draft a manifesto. And then when I joined, my job was to go through it with them, make sure we were aligned, and then we shared it with the company.

It's an internal document. It's actually a beautiful website that's been made which explains the kind of manifesto for how Polar Steps believes travel should be and how we want to behave as a company. And that document is really interesting because it's a very much a living document. It actually feeds part of our AI, so we used it to feed part of our AI, but we also talk about it.

So we were having a conversation last week about a feature we might want to build, and one of my colleagues was like, is this in line with the manifesto? And it's such a great question. Is, is this in line with the manifesto? Because you've taken a set of principles and beliefs that you can all agree, me and the founders, we all agree this.

And therefore, when we're making decisions, we can use it as a shorthand, which is, is this in line with the manifesto? If it's not, we should really reconsider what we're doing. And that's been a really helpful way to do that on a daily basis as well as kind of a big vision and mission basis. Guys, we'll be right back after the short ad break where Claire reveals the counterintuitive growth strategy that helped Polar Stops become one of Europe's fast travel apps without buying a single user.

Stay tuned. Okay, let's unpack that growth strategy. Claire, what's the biggest misconception founders have about user acquisition? And what did you do differently at Polar Steps?

So I think one of the things that people can get very excited about is it's very easy to acquire customers throughout ads. It's very easy. And you make some beautiful ads. You can put them on Instagram and you can get people clicking and downloading.

But the quality of the people that you're bringing in, that's the question mark, is, are they going to stick around? Are they going to engage? Are they the right kind of user? And so for us, there's been a different approach we're taking.

Actually, this is an approach we're taking in the US right now, which is we're not going out and we're doing loads of ads. Instead what we're doing is we're doing grassroots, bottom up growth. And so, for example, we know that if you look right back at the beginning of when Polar Steps first started, the reason it started to grow was that the founders were travellers. So they told their friends who were travelers and they told their friends who were travellers and they told their friends who are travellers.

And that growth was really powerful because it was getting the right users, users who were excited, users for whom there was huge, huge value and they were telling each other. So that's a lot of what our approach is. Instead of going, we're just going to spend loads and loads of money and we're just going to get lots and lots of users into the pipeline and lots of them are going to churn, but that'll be okay because it will come out in the wash. That's not what we're doing.

What we're really interested in is tell people who are travellers, who are adventurous about Polar Steps and they will fall in love because the product is amazing. So because we know this, because this is the feedback we always hear from users, they love Polar Steps. When I sit on support inbox, one of my favorite things is the amount of people, even if they found a bug, because there's already bugs somewhere, if they found a bug, so often they will start their email with, hi, hi guys, I want to tell you first of all how much I love Polar Steps.

And then they will say, I'm so sorry, but I think I might have found a bug or I'd like to request a change. But the fact that people are emailing us, starting, and sometimes all they do is to sell how much they love Polar Steps. That level of user love is so valuable. And instead of focusing on how can we grow and blitzscale something and get as many users in the funnel as possible, if what you focus on is how do we build a product that users fall in love with, they will bring Other users for you.

So the fact that our growth is organic is because users bring other users with them because they love the product, because it adds value to them. And so although we have found ways to speed this up with marketing, the vast majority of our users are coming organically. And for us that is the focus is how do we build an incredible product Product, not how do we go out and spend loads of money to acquire as many downloads as possible and focus on those vanity metrics. This is really very real.

So for example, our metrics that we use, there are loads of vanity metrics you could do. We've got loads of people, for example, who visit our web version of Polar Steps. We don't count those in our monthly active users. We could, lots of people would, it could be a nice vanity metric.

But for us we don't because what we care about is real, engaged, sustained, retained users. And that is because we are trying to build a product for the long term that people want of it. You've repeatedly said that Polar Steps will remain app free and privacy first. How do you monetize ethically while keeping trust sacred?

And in a data driven industry. Yeah. So I think people think that there is a trade off. So if you look at Per, in some ways is a social media app, right?

It's, it's very private social media. It is in some ways like a social media app. And in these other apps that have been designed, it's being presented as the only way to monetize this is through ads. So therefore we have to, we have to sell your data or you have to subscribe.

So we don't sell your data or we have to sell you ads. And that just is not true. There are lots of ways to make money and I think Polar Steps is a great example of this. So Kuhn, who was the original CEO and the founder who's still in the company, he had the idea of funding polar sepsis growth with travel books and that that could have easily with a different kind of found different with different types of founders with different values.

They could easily have gone. The way we're going to fund the growth is through ads or selling data. Instead, Kuhn went I would like to find a way to fund the growth that respects the users, it respects their privacy, it respects their data. It also respects their experience.

Because the minute you start showing those ads, you are changing that experience. And you might be saying, you know, right now we're very independent. We're able to say here are beautiful adventures that you could have over here. And we are not, not doing that because it's commercially better for us to show you this type of trip.

The minute you start to have ads and selling data, it's just really changing the user experience. And you're prioritizing money over the user, in this case by saying, you know what, we're going to fund our growth with travel books. It was a way for Kuhn and the team to say, we don't need to do the thing that everyone else does, which is sell your data, or you become the product as the user. We can still provide a free app by selling a physical product, which is really important to you as a traveler, and that allows us to fund our growth.

And I think that is just a different way of thinking. You come at it and you go, if my constraints are, I don't want to fundraise loads of money, because that's another option. You just fundraise loads. They didn't want to do that.

I don't want to fundraise and I don't want to sell our user either for ads or data. What are my constraints? What could I do within that? And that's where the travel books idea came from.

And that is quite a different way of thinking, because it's very rare that a tech company would say, you know what, I'm going to fund our first 15 million users through a physical product. But actually, it's been a way that's allowed us to get to this scale now. Now we're introducing more revenue streams that are more digital tool. It's not ads and it's not selling data.

It's things like affiliate partnerships, where if someone wants to book accommodation, et cetera, they can and we get some commission. But that allowed us to get to that level of growth without having to sacrifice our values and our ideals. And yes, it means we haven't got any of those horrible ads in the app. And we won't have any of those horrible ads in the app.

Oh, yeah. Just came to mind. A lot of apps that do have some type of gambling or crypto trading ads all over the place. That's.

Yeah. Other topic you've been just talking about. Affiliate partnerships and other partnerships. For example, Booking.

com, airbnb and Hostel Worlds are now part of your app experience. How do you decide which integrations fit your vision and where do you draw the line? And I'm very, very confident you not only decide on who gives you the bigger affiliate kickback. Right, right.

Yeah. So I. I think that's a great example. So we Have Hostelworld on the platform.

And obviously the spend on a, on a kind of booking basis of something like Hostel World versus a hotel platform is very different. Right. They're going to spend a lot less on something like a Hostel World because that's hostels. It's not expensive, four star hotels.

But that's a great example where this is all about the user. So lots of our users are young. We are talking about very young people who are often traveling on their first adventures as independent humans away from their parents. And they're not going to be staying in expensive places, they're going to be staying in places like, like hostels.

And so what we're trying to do is listen to the needs of the user and yes, you might make more money if you were directing them to other types of more expensive platforms. But what we want is the user to feel happy and excited on polar steps. And a key thing here is those are accommodation partners that we have. So if you come through and you plan a trip with us and you haven't booked your accommodation, you can say, oh, look, yes, I have the option to go to airbnb booking.

com or hostelworld. But the step before that is, if you already have accommodation, we have a really wonderful way that you can just forward those accommodations bookings to an email and they will appear beautifully in your itinerary, even if you book them anywhere else. So what we're trying to do is give lots of choice to the user and say, how do you want to travel? And that could be you're staying with your friend for part of the trip and you just put that in your booking and that's in your itinerary that you're staying with Emma for three nights.

Or it could be, I'm camping, I've booked a campsite. All of those things can go into your plan. So what we're trying to do is give users the choice and to listen to them. And then we know we've got a load of young users on the platform and, and that's great for us.

We love having young users. We're not trying to monetize them more than they would feel comfortable. We're totally happy to have young users on the platform booking things like hostels that might not make as much money as an expensive hotel, but are much more on brand and part of this adventurous spirit of bolus steps. We've been talking about a lot of doing the stuff that your users like.

I was wondering, as a leader, how do you keep innovation alive in a product that's already beloved. What tools, what mechanisms do you use to ensure your teams keep reimagining travel rather than just simply optimizing step by step? Yeah, so I think a lot of this is in the structure of the company. And so a thing that we have, which I think really helps with this, is we have our product managers and they have a design person that they work really closely with.

So, for example, in our track, which is what we call the bit where you're on your trip and you're sharing with your friends and family, we have an absolutely amazing designer, Fika, and we have an absolutely amazing product manager, Analyne. And the fact that they work so closely together all the time. So they are. It's not like they.

You're having a different designer for each project. They work really, really closely together. And that breeds innovation because, number one, they're both users of the app, so they always think about things that they would like as a user. But number two, they're incredibly rigorous in how they think.

But they're also sparring partners. So you have someone from the design and someone from the product perspective, and then you also have someone from the engineering perspective who's what we call a pillar captain, who works with them from the engineering perspective. So you have those three people who care very, very deeply about that one bit of the app and also, of course, how it leads into the other bits of the app beside it. But they care very, very deeply about it, and they are empowered to really own that roadmap themselves.

And that's really, really important, because I might have an idea, but I have a totally different vantage point. So my idea should be data, but it shouldn't be direction. My idea should be input, just like anybody else in the company's idea is input. And then we have to these groups of people and the teams that they work with, the engineering teams particularly, and the user research team, who are then able to help them do that.

The other thing we have is we have a group, we call them Focus Projects, but this is a group who work across all kinds of different bits of the business. And this is so Kuhn, who was the original CEO and is a product founder. Kuhn actually runs that. And that allows us to innovate as well, because you have somebody who has all the experience of having been a CEO, understands both the business, business and the industry very, very deeply, and can therefore innovate.

And so, for example, we recently launched an amazing video feature, and that came out of Kuhn's team, which was an innovation team. And so that's the lovely thing is it allows us, by having this team that sort of sits outside the normal structure a little bit, it allows you to basically have these kind of innovation projects and you can try new things and you can run really fast because you have someone with that deep, deep product experience, experience of strategy, experience of decision making of commercials, all those things in that product manager role that Kuhn takes on with those projects.

And that's a really special thing that I'm really pleased that we've been able to do do by having a founder who stayed in the business. I was wondering for our audience, let's get tactical at the moment. Inside the founder's world, Claire will share parts of the growth dashboard. Polostep uses Claire Travel apps touch deep emotional territory like memory, belonging, nostalgia.

How do you design your ex that respects these emotions while driving engagement and business outcomes? Yeah, and this is, this is a key thing which is in, in the product decisions, you are always thinking about authenticity. And so an example of this would be it would be really easy for us to build a feature that takes when people are writing. So when people write the kind of journal, we call it a step.

When they write their update of their day or that location, it's a lot of text. And sometimes people spend many hours, sometimes people spend a few minutes. Minutes. It depends on the person.

A very easy thing you could do would be build an LLM that would just take a few notes and write it for you. And that for me is not authentic. If all that's happened is you've taken a few notes, like, I saw a sunset, I went on a bike ride, whatever. And then you feed it to the LLM and it will write a narrative for you that is not your real voice.

There might be ways that we can help speed things up. We might want to look about how people can input their notes more efficiently. But what we don't want is an LLM actually writing your step for you, because that is losing the authenticity and that emotion. And for us, so much of the value in polar steps is the value for me in 10 years, not, not tomorrow.

So when I've just been on a trip, I remember everything. Like a month later, I remember most things. Three years later, I've forgotten huge parts of that trip. And when I go back to my polar steps and I look at the text that I wrote me as a real human with my emotion on that day or on that week that I had that adventure, it comes back to me because it was real.

If you just, just take Shortcuts, which is like, yeah, we could. For example, that would be how do we get people writing more text? Because maybe we think that might help drive engagement. You could take a shortcut, which is, yeah, great, let's just get an LLM to write it.

But then you're losing the authenticity, the reality, the thing that creates the long term value for the user. Because this is not just about sharing with my friends and family in the moment. This is also about me remembering this and looking back on it in the rest of my life. Which is one of the key bits of the value of Polar Steps is this becomes the profile of me as a traveler.

Every place I've been, every adventure I've had had in detail and I want to be able to look back and remember it. So that's just one example. But the whole thing is keep authenticity at the core. When we're designing, when we're thinking about products and features, really, really care about that authentic experience.

And that has to form part of the design decisions. You've been part of the management team of two scale ups with global reach. How do you see the. Compare the dynamics of them and.

And what did he carry over from one to another? Yeah, so they're very different in some ways and very similar in others, I think. Yeah. One of the interesting things about what three words was having to educate people that an entirely new addressing system was needed.

You were taking an addressing system which was designed for postal delivery hundreds of years ago and going, should we maybe update this now? And now we have devices and maybe have something that's designed more for human machine interaction. So there was a lot of education needed at Polar Steps. You actually don't need to do any education.

So that's quite a fun difference is that here all you need to do is get the app in the hands of a traveler and that's it. They will fall in love, they will tell their friends. So that's been a difference. I think one of the things that I've taken across with me is the learning that extraordinary people can do huge amounts of things even on their own.

So we had at what three words? I remember one of my favorite bits of the company was as we were starting to get traction in the U.S. u.

S. We hired this amazing person, Marcus. And Marcus just ran around the US making things that you didn't even think possible happen. I remember once he came back and he was like, yeah.

So I've convinced one of the biggest music festivals in this state to put signs out saying download the app. And he thought that that was free. He didn't pay for that. He just convinced them to do it just because he is this incredibly charismatic and intelligent and amazing person who could run around and make amazing things happen.

And so I remember that and I remember having how valuable it can be if you, you choose the right person. They can just make extraordinary things happen. And we've just hired an amazing person, Nina, who is an extraordinary person who can make huge things happen in the US Because I learned that lesson, which is you don't need a huge marketing budget and you don't need 25 people if you're trying to keep your team and your company small. If you find one extraordinary person, they can make huge leaps in a market because they are extraordinary.

And that was the thing I loved learning. I've loved seeing it come true many times over in my career, that extraordinary people, these amazing people with exceptional skill sets, can just make huge things happen. And yeah, I'm really enjoying replicating that one here. Being an EMT for almost a decade, first in national service and then working through apprenticeship and study, there's a lot of stories I could tell where street addresses usually don't work, especially if you need to find them urgently, but that's a completely different topic.

And I'm totally fine with getting rid of this system, but. But let's look a little bit ahead. There's artificial intelligence, there is augmented reality, immersive travel. What future tech do you believe will most change how people plan and relive their journeys by 2030?

Yeah, I mean, of course, isn't it wonderful to imagine what reliving your adventure can look like in a world where we've got more 3D and more wearables and all those sorts of things? Of course, that's exciting. I actually think the interesting thing that will happen will be a bit of pushback against what we're seeing already right now on the Internet with travel, which is AI generated content taking over a lot of these spaces. So whether that's blogs, even increasingly upsettingly, we're seeing this on Reddit, which has for so long been so authentic.

But people have understood that Reddit feeds the LLMs. So they're paying, you know, they're basically paying companies or doing it themselves to fill it up with AI content to try and get their company mentioned or their brand mentioned. And I think the interesting pushback we will see is we'll see, see a reversal a little bit towards trusted sources that come from humans, because we know LLMs can do all sorts of things. But it's very surface level, right?

If you need depth, if you want depth, you need a human. And so as we look at travel content, we're seeing already that over time, as LLMs absorb content made by other LLMs, it very quickly becomes nonsense and not usable. So we need human beings involved in this. And so I think we'll see a bit more of a swing away from, from public information made by LLMs and easily consumed by LLMs towards sources that are trusted and authentic and actually sometimes closed communities.

So we see this in Polar Steps. We see people viewing Polar Steps as a trusted source because it's got other travelers and it's real stories and it's not public, actually, that not everything in Polar Steps is public and it's not all being crawled by LLMs and it's not all being written by LLMs. And that's actually something that we're seeing a lot. And you see it already in people love communities like Strava.

Strava is a great example where you have this people who are loving their kind of closed community of people, whether it's trust and its authenticity. And I think that's a trend that we will see coming back. So we've had this couple of years where everyone's got very excited by everything that LLMs can do, including in Travel World, where there's so much travel content out there right now written by LLMs. And I think we're going to see an increasing swing back towards trusting the travel content of the people around you, of your friends and family, of travelers like you, and of travel experts.

And at Polar Steps, we think this is really important, which is why we have a team of human editors who are travel experts who shape a huge amount of amount of our content at Polar Steps, because we believe that that is where it's coming back to, which is trust and authenticity and a bit of the human stuff in there. Because otherwise the LLM content, it doesn't take very long before that becomes incredibly useless, really, because it's either very broad or you have this thing of LLMs absorbing content written by other LLMs and it becomes nonsense quite quickly.

I personally discovered, for me, the more digital the world became, the more physical reminders of travels. I bought to just counteract this a little bit, but just personal belief going into another personal belief. What contrarian belief you hold about the travel industry, something most founders or investors in your opinions, they get wrong. For me, I think this is about values, which is that you cannot build a travel business and pretend it doesn't have an impact on the world, both environmentally and in terms of communities.

And I think the problem we have at the moment is we don't talk enough about that in the early stages, when people are founding businesses, when they're scaling those businesses. And actually, you know, in my experience, the investors that we love speaking to are the ones who do care about this and are saying, what does your impact look like in the world? How do you think about slow travel? How do you think about climate change?

How do you think about over tourism? And if. And there are a lot, but there are also investors who don't care about those things. They're just.

Just thinking about the bottom line. And I think, for me, I'm sure nobody ever went into the travel world trying to design things that would be negative, but we have had accidental negative impacts. So if you look at this, for example, with Instagram, we know that we've seen this thing where an influencer will go to a place and it might be a small village and there might be something really beautiful there, and they will post a video and it will go viral and people will descend on that village, and the village doesn't have the infrastructure for it.

Often the villagers don't want you there. Often the tourists will behave disgracefully. They will drop rubbish everywhere. People won't even get the Instagram picture they wanted because they'll stand queue for 25 minutes and then they'll have to Photoshop out the rubbish that was in the picture.

All these things were not intentional, but they can be avoided if you are intentional about your design. So a thing that I really believe we should do in the travel industry is care about the impact, care about the impact on communities, care about the impact on environment. So when you're making product decisions and when you're making growth decisions, you're also accounting for that, because if you don't, you will have a negative impact accidentally, even if you didn't intend to, you will.

And so for us, it's about having, having a positive impact and helping people travel in ways that are good for the world, good for the communities, good for them, good for curiosity, rather than just assuming that travel has no impact. Travel has an impact and you should care about and you should design with that in mind. We do have a lot of founders, different stages as well, future founders who are listening to this episode. And I think you have to be really interested if you're still sticking with us.

We're now recording for more than 50 minutes. You have an amazing guest. Thank you, Claire. But for Future founders who are listening and dream of scaling a consumer app from Europe into the world.

What's one lesson you'd engrave into their office wall so they see it every day? Do not believe people who say, you cannot do this as Europeans. So we. There is so much of this idea that Silicon Valley is the place, particularly in consumer Silicon Valley.

You've got to be in Silicon Valley. You've got to be in the US if you want to build a massive consumer app. App, or you can only build a massive consumer app if everybody works 996 and you don't respect people's work life balance and you don't respect privacy and data and labor law and the things that we have actually protected a lot in Europe, don't believe those things. We can do this.

We are doing this right now. We are building a beautiful app that is used all over the world. We've got 18 million travelers. The growth has absolutely shot up.

And we are doing it in line with European values and we are doing it in a way that takes care of, of our employees and our team, as well as our users as well as our users, privacy. And I think that is a really important message that we need to be proud in Europe that we can build big businesses. And this is going to be a really big business. This is going to be a global brand and we're going to build it here in Europe.

We're not moving to the U.S. we're building it in Amsterdam. We're proud of being European.

And so anybody who is out there, people will say to you, you can't build big businesses in Europe. Yes, you can. We have a bunch of big businesses we built here, including in consumer. Believe in it.

Don't. Don't listen to a few small voices that might tell, you have to move to the US Particularly from investors. They might say, the only way to make this work is to move it to the US that is not the only way. We can build huge businesses in Europe with wonderful European values and we can do this.

So don't listen to the people who say otherwise. I would engrave that in a wall. Finally, the last official question. We do have the two mandatory closing questions, as always.

Finally, when you're looking back over you when this is going to be published, around 18 months as CEO, what's been the most defining moment, the one that changed how you lead? I would say our winter party last year, because there was this moment where the team had surprised us. So I didn't know they were doing this and they had written a song. So they'd rewritten the words of a Christmas song to be about the company and including a character of me.

Me. So one of our. One of our developers, he dressed up as me, including a wig. And I'm a very cold person, so I'm always wearing a body warmer in the office.

And he even managed to get a body warmer. And he was dressed up as me. And he and a few colleagues made this beautiful and very funny song. And it was one of the warmest things that I have experienced at work because it was so full of affection for the company, but also for us as leaders.

And it was actually like an incredibly touching moment. And it was something that I. I have really taken forward with me because it really breaks down the barriers between the team and you as a leader when you have this warmth between you and. Because this is a company that has so much warmth in its culture and people who are so affectionate and funny and kind and like that.

For me, because I had only been there since June at that point, that for me was such a wonderful moment of, oh, wow. This is a place where I, as a human, can feel really warm and welcomed and appreciated, even as a lead leader. You know, as a leader, you often try and think about, how do I make other people feel included and valued and appreciated. And at Polar Steps, I feel that all the time from our team, we have this incredibly warm team.

And that, for me, was a wonderful thing to actually get to experience. And it's also, I think, yeah, for me, that it instilled in me the importance of caring for our team and our culture because it is so special, because it can make me as the CEO, the new CEO. Coming into this company feels so included and so able to be myself. And that is a really special thing.

And that gave me, like, an incredibly high bar for how we grow this company and make sure that we protect so much of what is special about this company. I have a special sense of humor, and I'm still trying to let sink in that you're a person who's always code leading a company that starts with the name Polar. Okay, not going to drill on that. Our usual questions for the close.

Are you open to talk to new investors? Yes, if they're investors who care about values and behaving well in the world. And are you currently looking for talented employees? Yes, absolutely.

Lots and lots of hiring. Please get in touch. We have a careers website with lots of roles on and we're always adding to it. Claire, thank you.

Thank you very much. It was pleasure having you as guest and we almost hitting the one hour mark for a very very nice interview. Thank you very much. Was a pleasure.

Thank you. Thanks. That's all folks. Find more news streams, events and interviews@www.

startuprad.IO. remember, sharing is caring. Sam.