Most travel companies are founded because someone who loves travel spots a gap in the market. Plotpackers started differently.
At 21, I was sexually assaulted on a solo backpacking trip. I consider myself lucky to have survived it.
Two years later, at 23, I started Plotpackers with one goal: to build what I wish had existed for me as a young woman travelling the world solo.
I’d never heard of product-market fit, net profit, or scaling, and to be completely honest, I couldn’t have cared less.
All I could think about was that solo travel needed to feel safer for women. It was less business, more purpose – and in hindsight, that’s exactly what ended up making it work from day one.
Dragons’ Den makes history with first female-majority panel
That purpose found an audience immediately, on zero marketing budget.
On day one, the moment I announced the launch on Instagram, we did over £40,000 in sales. In our first year, thousands of people booked and went on a Plotpackers trip. Entirely bootstrapped. Entirely word of mouth.
But what struck me wasn’t just the numbers, it was what people came back saying.
They weren’t just telling us they felt safe. They were telling us they’d made friends for life. That they felt more confident. That they’d got out of their comfort zone. And, reassuringly: ‘when’s the next one?’
That’s when it became clear the problem I was solving went well beyond safety. It was community. It was people choosing to travel ethically, safely, and, most importantly, together.
It’s that same desire – to be together, to experience new things alongside other people – that has ultimately scaled the business.
In our second full year, we reached £2m in turnover, profitably, before taking a penny of investment.
Getting there as a first-time female founder, though, has been another matter entirely.
I launched Plotpackers while backpacking out of hostels. Now I run the business from a London office with a team. That transition has been a baptism of fire, and I’ve made plenty of mistakes I’ve had to learn from fast.
Even now, going on Dragons’ Den, scaling the business intentionally, and building proprietary technology to support that growth, I still can’t say I’m particularly excited about the numbers.
It’s the people. It’s the purpose. It’s the drive to make things a little bit safer for women. Which is really the whole thing in a sentence: what happens when a raging feminist launches a business?
For me, that purpose extends beyond the trips themselves into the local economic opportunities we’ve been able to create around the world, and the fact that we’re able to build genuinely better opportunities for women in places where they don’t naturally exist.
On our Kilimanjaro departures, for example, we require a female guide. This is no small task given there are fewer than 50 registered female guides on the mountain, a reflection of deeply patriarchal norms within the industry.
In Peru, we run trips with an all-female guiding team. And beyond the trips themselves, I’ve built my own platforms where I talk candidly about the reality of being a first-time female founder with the goal of helping the next female founder that comes along – the good, the bad, and the ugly.
None of that comes from backing away from a challenge, and Dragons’ Den won’t be any different. I’d never taken an investor meeting prior to this, which makes it, by a long way, my biggest risk yet. But the common thread running through all of this is that I don’t do things by half. And that’s what makes it exciting.
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