Hipcamp pivoted from campground directory to private-land marketplace (interview)

A booking marketplace for camping on public, commercial and — the bet — private land, with landowners as hosts.

The shortage, not the booking friction, was the market: opening private land to campers adds supply public campgrounds never could — and builds a moat as it grows.

Seed led by OATV's Bryce Roberts, plus $250,000 from Dave Morin after a user with a large Twitter following recommended the site.

Alyssa Ravasio learned to code at Dev Bootcamp and built the first version with her sisters and friends as 'California Camping', then marketed it from a card table outside an REI in San Francisco.

She emailed users a $500 bounty for introductions to landowners, found the first private-land host at Mendocino Magic, and says insurance for landowners was the turning point. Around 2017, a farmers' association newsletter brought hundreds of host sign-ups in a morning. California later created an opt-in lane letting farms and ranches host up to nine campsites without RV-park permitting.

A booking layer on full campgrounds had a ceiling: helping people find places cannot fix there being too few places.

Private-land hosts had land and intent but no insurance, marketing or audience — three gaps a marketplace fills at once.

The public-land directory seeded demand first, so new private supply met campers already searching; Ravasio says campers cared more about a beautiful spot than who managed it.

Scarcity itself built the moat, in her account: every added campsite improves camper choice and every camper makes hosting more valuable to the next landowner.

Find the constraint upstream of your product: a directory for a scarce resource becomes a marketplace when it starts manufacturing supply.

As of the October 2026 interview, Ravasio puts the company near 100 employees, mostly remote, with in-person sessions held at campsites. She says Hipcamp sends more bookings to US commercial campgrounds than any other platform by nearly an order of magnitude, and points to hosts like a 600-acre ranch keeper who now files developers' purchase offers away as junk mail. All figures are her own account in the interview.