Cree Lawson combined his curiosity for technology with his career in the travel industry to create Travel Ad Network, which connects advertisers with travel-related audiences online. Travel advertisers were frustrated with the inability to track whether ad viewers actually visited the destinations they promoted, so Cree figured out a solution and started his second travel tech venture.

Arrivalist was created in 2012 to provide offline visitor tracking and analytics to online advertisers in the travel industry. They bootstrapped and grew efficiently, with some revenue-based financing from Lighter Capital, not requiring big outside equity funding to build out their platform and acquire new customers. 

They grew steadily and became was through 2019. After the COVID travel disruption faded, Cree sold Arrivalist to Alpine Investors, owners of AirDNA, another travel data company. John is no longer the CEO of Arrivalist, but he is still involved in the company as a board member and spokesperson.

Quote from Cree Lawson, Founder of Arrivalist

“New entrepreneurs need to answer three questions to see if they have a real business. Can you do it? Will people pay you to do it? Will you get paid more than it costs to do it? You can answer those without spending a lot of money.

“Once you answer those three questions, you are off and running. I could answer those questions at Arrivalist, and we didn’t need to raise outside funding. Bootstrapping was a bad word in 2011. People told me to stop calling myself a bootstrapper, but it worked well for us.”

Links

• Cree Lawson on LinkedIn
• Arrivalist on LinkedIn
• AirDNA website
• Alpine Investors

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