RoamCircle opens in 13 cities in its first year
Elizabeth Rivas built a network for women travelling alone after a divorce took her through 13 countries. The events that worked best were the ones she turned up to, which is now the company's problem to solve.
RoamCircle, an app that connects women travelling alone with other women nearby, is live in 13 cities. The company says all 13 were added within its first year.
The founder, Elizabeth Rivas, started it after leaving her marriage and travelling through 13 countries. Flights, accommodation and things to do took minutes to arrange, she says. Finding people to do them with did not.
Users pick a location, see other members in the area, start conversations and look up local groups and events. Community organisers can submit their own events through an admin portal, which puts listings from several organisers in one place.
The 13 cities were chosen as destinations for solo travellers, digital nomads and expats, according to the company. The locations can be viewed inside the app.
RoamCircle has also run events offline. The company says coworking sessions, dinners, happy hours and other gatherings in Miami, Lisbon, Paris, Barcelona and Mexico City have brought together hundreds of attendees in total.
Three group trips are live and three more are being developed with women who already run their own communities, on the company's account.
The offline programme exposed the constraint. Rivas says the events with the strongest attendance and engagement were the ones she attended herself.
That does not scale past one person. RoamCircle is now building a host-led model, giving local women and community leaders a structure to run gatherings under the platform's name.
It is a familiar handover, and the hard part of it is quality control. A network whose main asset is trust has to decide who gets to convene in its name, and what happens when a host disappoints the room.
The company says its longer-term plan is to route travellers towards women-owned accommodation, businesses and experiences, keeping more of their spending with women-led firms. No timeline for that has been announced.
Pricing has not been announced, and the company has not released membership numbers.
For founders building community products, the RoamCircle problem is the one worth watching. Attendance that depends on the founder being in the room is a real signal and a false metric at the same time; the second version of the business is whichever structure survives her absence.
More: RoamCircle · the company's press page