The people behind the app: CEO Clare Jones on accelerating growth, diverse revenue streams, and company culture

What was it about Polarsteps that convinced you to join the company?

It was one of those things that felt more inevitable the more I spoke to the founders and team. At first, I thought, ‘This is a really cool app; I should talk to them,’ but in reality, I didn’t expect to fall in love the way I did. I loved my life, my job, and being in London. Then, as I got to know the team better, so many things changed my mind and made me feel that I had to join this team.

One was the people. Every time I met someone else from the team, it turned out to be someone I wanted to be in a room with. Someone I'd learn from, and who'd make me laugh. Everyone I met through the process was smart and funny, and that led to the company culture, which we all know is really special and unique.

Then, selfishly, the numbers were pretty good too. I remember the founders sent me a bunch of numbers, including user retention and things like that, and it was a moment where I thought: this is about to really take off. Which it then did, that same summer. 

You have wonderful travel apps in the world, but they really struggle with retention. They have to keep reacquiring users because most people travel only once a year and forget about the app in between. The fact that Polarsteps has this incredible user retention and customer love was one of the things that made me realize: this is unique. 

Once you actually joined, what impressed you most, and what did you want to change?

One thing that surprised me was that the company was already in such good shape. I'd previously helped scale a company to 150+ people, and I thought I could use my experience to avoid missteps. Instead, I found that Sascha (Head of People and Ops) and her team had already set up something far more professional than I'd seen anywhere else at a company of 30 or so people. Everything was so well run, so I was (very) happily surprised.

The other piece was the company values. You can guess whether a company feels values-aligned from the outside, but you don't know it's true until you're in it. Here, people make decisions using the values they created when the company was in its infancy. One of my first projects — working with the founders and the editorial team on the company manifesto  — was about exactly that: who do we want to be, and how do we want to behave in the world at this leadership transition point. That was a wonderful first project to be part of.

As for what needed to change, we had this beautiful product, but it wasn't that famous outside the Netherlands yet. A lot of our more recent focus has been on helping people discover our app across the rest of Europe and in the US. The earlier stage of Polarsteps was about doing things sustainably, getting that user love, and growing organically, without really investing in marketing. When I joined, the company was ready and, importantly, profitable, with enough cash to really start investing in growth. So it became a question of maintaining organic growth and word of mouth (which is still around 90% of how people find us) and adding fuel to it through marketing. This is about going out to find users rather than just waiting for them to come to us. When we get the app in people’s hands, they fall in love with it, so our job now is to get it into more hands.

And what about working with the founders themselves?

At the stage we're at, with more than €20 million in revenue and tens of millions of users, many companies see their founders step back or find that their board or investors aren’t quite as supportive anymore. The fact that we still have three of our original founders working in the business every day is so special. They're deep thinkers about product, design, and technology, and their commitment to the users and a beautiful experience has never changed since the early days. They knew what they wanted to build: a place for travelers to plan, track, and relive their adventures. Having that singular vision carried forward by founders who still work on the app every day is a big part of why it's worked and why it continues to grow.

Looking back over the last couple of years, what are you most proud of?

The things I'm most proud of are what the team has achieved. One is that we've built an incredible planning app that brings the human side of travel planning in a world of AI. Polarsteps started as an amazing tracker that people fell in love with, and what the team has done over the last eighteen months to integrate planning features has been brilliant. I look at Reddit and other places every day to see what people are saying, and it's a joy to see people sharing planned itineraries, giving each other tips, and asking for input on their trips using their Polarsteps links.

What makes this especially meaningful is also the timing. A lot of the travel-tech world has gone hard on AI planning: plan your whole trip in five minutes, outsource it to a machine. We're doing something different, helping people enjoy the planning itself as part of the joy of their trip. And with over 25 million trips on Polarsteps, we have something pretty special to inspire people. We have real recommendations from friends and family you trust, written by travelers for themselves rather than for a big audience, which makes them authentic in a way other social media isn't. This is especially powerful for Gen Z, who tell us that privacy and authenticity matter so much to them. 

The other thing I'm proud of is that we've grown to 100 people and kept a really high talent density. This growth has, of course, had an effect. We don't all know each other the way we used to, but the team has worked hard to retain the heart of the place and make sure everyone feels like they belong. Everyone feels it when they walk in the door, and I hope that as we grow a bit more, it will still feel the way it does now. 

One question we are often asked is how does a free app like Polarsteps actually make money.

For a long time, Polarsteps generated revenue solely through our beautiful Travel Books, which allow people to print physical books of their adventures. In a digital world, the analog way to remember a trip is so special (who doesn’t remember the old-school photo albums of parents and grandparents?). 

That's how we became profitable and got to over €20 million in revenue. Once millions of users are using your product, you can start adding to the proposition, and features that help people plan their trips are key to that. We've now added the ability to book accommodations through the app and add them to your planned trip. If you haven't already booked somewhere to stay, we can point you to Booking.com, Airbnb, or Hostelworld, depending on your trip, and for every booking we earn a small affiliate commission. That launched last year and has gone really well as a new revenue stream alongside the Travel Books.

A key belief we all share is that we don't want to sell user data or run ads. Polarsteps is a company of travelers, and we wouldn't want our own data sold or exploited. So the question becomes: how do you build a company that can grow and take on the world without doing that? Affiliates help. Travel Books help. And Polarsteps Plus, which we launched about a month ago, has been incredible. 

With the introduction of Polarsteps Plus, we haven't taken anything away from users; we've just added extra features for hikers and long-term travelers: more detailed statistics, 3D maps, the kinds of things that matter more if you're away for six months or on a serious mountain adventure. People can subscribe on a monthly or yearly basis, and most are choosing yearly. The response has seriously exceeded our expectations. 

So many people have told us they want to buy Plus to support us because we don't sell their data or show them ads. Others just wanted the new features. Both are great outcomes. Now, as a company, we have three revenue streams instead of one, which makes us more resilient and allows us to invest more seriously in growth in places like the US.

What are your future ambitions for Polarsteps?

We're aiming for 100 million monthly active users! And at that scale, we have the opportunity to positively influence how people travel. We've seen the negative impact social media can have on communities; the same few places become flooded with tourists and sometimes with rubbish, and the local community has no way to cope with the volume. We're seeing something similar now with AI. LLMs are statistical models, so their recommendations are based on the places everybody already goes. 

So how do we ensure we aren’t contributing to this? We already see that travelers use each other's trips for inspiration, and by showcasing amazing trips that don’t just focus on the most popular destinations, we can shape where people choose to go. It's also built into how our editorial team thinks about the places we recommend. And it connects to slow travel. Visually, Polarsteps is perfectly suited to multi-destination trips where train, bus, ferries, and even cycling or hiking are the main modes of transport. The way the map works — along with the destinations and activities our editorial team recommends — lends itself beautifully to showing people how to travel a little slower, a little more sustainably, and with more care for the places they pass through. Our manifesto drives how we think about this, and it will be coming with us as we reach the 100m MAU mark.