Hipcamp: the private-land bet that turned camping scarcity into a marketplace

Key points

Key takeaways from Source interview with Hipcamp founder and CEO Alyssa Ravasio on Masters of Scale (October 2026):

From directory to marketplace. Hipcamp launched in 2013 as California Camping, a directory of public campgrounds built to fix a deeply fragmented booking process — a coastal California trip could mean checking 15 different park websites.

The scarcity wake-up call. As traffic grew, campers wrote angry letters when the service promoted bookable sites: public campgrounds were already at capacity, and the last unbooked spots were treated as a guarded secret. Ravasio realised the root problem was supply, not discovery.

The private-land bet. Over dinner with her husband at a North Beach Italian restaurant, she listed every conceivable business model on the paper tablecloth and tested each against one question: if this were wildly successful in ten years, what impact would it have had? Only private land solved the root cause by creating genuinely new supply.

Community-led growth. Early customers came from grassroots techniques — stickers at meetups, a card table outside REI, and a personal reply to every support email. One prompt response about a pets filter was tweeted by a customer with a large following, spiking traffic and landing the company's first funding from Dave Morren, who invested $4M that month.

Public data as seed supply. The company bootstrapped the marketplace with publicly available campground data, then layered in bookable private land as demand arrived; insurance — a general policy covering all hosts — was the turning point that made landowners willing to list.

Learning to code. An inability to find an engineer willing to build it pushed Ravasio to Dev Bootcamp; she learned to code and built the first version with her sisters as employees, echoing the family film studio she ran aged ten.

Scale beats Airbnb's shadow. Asked repeatedly what stops Airbnb from entering camping, she argues the outdoor mindset is a different use case and brand, and that marketplace network effects — every new site improving the experience for every camper — are the ultimate moat.

Founder health. Scaling took a personal toll: Ravasio developed shingles from stress and ended up in an emergency room, a reminder that managing founder energy is part of building a company.

Read more: Masters of Scale (YouTube)