Future Sessions: Q&A with Joah Spearman, Founder of Localeur
Design and product professionals have been wrestling with a culture of “move fast and break things.” One of the trends we’re noticing is the idea of unintended consequences — or — what happens when business values are put ahead of impact and accountability. So our topic for Future Sessions is, “Move fast and fix things” — specifically, what are the cultural and technological levers, or challenges, of getting into that space?
This week, Modernist CEO Matt Franks is talking with Localeur Founder Joah Spearman about planning for the unknown, how the travel industry is adapting now that most travel has been put on hold, cultural appropriation, and future-readiness.
On September 29, Modernist Studio hosts Future Sessions with Joah, Elizabeth Gore from Hello Alicce, and Diana Griffin from Nava to continue the conversation.
Reserve your ticket to this free event! Offered as part of World Interaction Design Day (IxDD), presented by Adobe and IxDA.
Joah Spearman: One of the founding elements of our company in the travel space, honestly, was that the future of travel is local. In a lot of ways — even with the unknown of the pandemic — the idea that ‘the future of travel is local’ is still true. If anything, it’s even more true, and more pronounced in a time like now — where exploring your own city is probably as good as it’s gonna get. You’re not necessarily hopping on a plane and going on some exotic vacation as would normally be the case during this time of year.
[With Localeur] one of the main things that I have been focused on is continuing this Northstar direction of communicating that getting to know a more local experience is actually going to unlock more value for you as a traveler. The same types of behaviors you should practice when you’re in your own city are the ones that you should take with you when you travel. If you know the person who owns the local coffee shop down the street from where you live, that’s the same type of behavior that’s probably gonna be beneficial when you travel. You find yourself wanting to embrace these local communities while not feeding ecosystems with the kinds of behavior that lead to overtourism.
So for us, I think one thing is sticking to that Northstar of “the future of travel is local” and how we help people learn and practice that behavior.
It took us a couple of months after the pandemic hit to really absorb the impact of COVID on the business, which is pretty drastic, you know? I took a couple of months, honestly, to absorb it and get to the point of, “Okay, this isn’t going to kill us. We’re gonna get a beating here, but how do we stand tall and stay in the ring?” And now we’re back at the point where we can throw our own punches.
There’s a certain sentiment right now, a certain malaise — or whatever you wanna call it — that is real. You can almost sense it — and so people want to look for places of hope and inspiration and discovery that they can’t get right now in other forms.
Even something as simple as listening to Joe Biden’s speech at the DNC. He was talking about going to the light instead of the darkness, and he said the word “light” something like 11 times. I think people want that right now because we’ve spent the last couple of months, here in the US especially, in this hamster wheel or Groundhog’s Day-like scenario.
It’s a known that people still want to find positivity and lightness in their content and in their feeds and whatnot. That’s part of what our job is as a content-centered company is — to provide some of that.
JS: Very much. Respect is definitely a foundational part of it. Respect is the baseline you should carry with you when you’re going anywhere, especially when you’re going somewhere new. Some cultures beget respect more than others — the very nature of Japan subtly imposes its will on you in a way that demands a certain level of respect for the land, for where you are. Whereas other places in Western Europe — where American tourists have contributed to some of the overtourism — it varies from supporting businesses with tourism dollars to contributing to an ecosystem in which the city relies more on tourists flying in for a few days than it does on the locals who live there. As a result, the affordability of those cities has drastically changed.
I think the key for me is really having a sense of empathy for the place you’re going. It’s like, “Seek first to understand before you can be understood.” It’s not supposed to be the same as the place you came from, so don’t go to a restaurant in another part of the world and expect the same thing as what you get in the United States.
JS: The main thing we do to foster empathy is to amplify the voices of people who live in the cities. One of the great things about the Internet — especially that first phase in the late ’90s and early 2000s — is that it had this mission to organize the world’s information, and you saw that happening.
Where we started to go wrong was in the second phase — connecting people and things with that information. That’s where you have the second generation of tech companies — like Yelp or Facebook — and you start seeing the loss of some of the empathy there because now you have very uniform-looking sites and platforms. Whether you’re a plumbing business or restaurant, Yelp makes you look the same. Facebook makes you look the same, whether you’re a 13-year-old or a 73-year-old. What often happens is these platforms bake in a lack of empathy by relying on this uniformity.
In travel how it’s taken shape is sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor have millions and millions of reviews, but there’s no differentiation, really, between the feedback and sentiment of locals versus visitors. So business owners mining their TripAdvisor or Yelp reviews to see how they’re doing end up over indexing for tourism, for travelers.
More recently we’re seeing whole businesses building themselves for the lens of an Instagram influencer. Like, “We’re gonna design our tables and make our food look this way for our Instagram,” instead of reflecting the local culture.
So for Localeur, all the content — all the photos, all the words — are rooted in the information that people that actually live in these cities tell us. We try to amplify their voices, and that’s our number one way of working to emphasize what the locals think about a place as opposed to imposing the will of tourists.
JS: Definitely, because the people are moving. People are more mobile than ever. Perfect example: we have a Localeur who is Serbian. She grew up in the Serbian/Croatian area, then lived in Vancouver for years, and she just moved to Barcelona last year. Now she and her fiance are getting ready to go to Italy for three months. Her partner is in the food industry so let’s say five years from now they open up their own place. And now they’re not going to be just mimicking all these things. They’re going to come up with their own melding of all those different influences and create something that’s new to wherever it is. I’m seeing a lot of that in our community.
We had so many Localeur who we were introduced to 5 or 6 years ago in a specific city and then they moved somewhere else. We had a Localeur from D.C. who was living in Phoenix, Arizona and really involved in the coffee community. She moved to one of the coffee capitals of the world, Melbourne, Australia. From Melbourne she moved to LA, and so in a matter of six years, she lived in D.C., Phoenix, Melbourne and now LA and the whole time she’s working around coffee. You’re not moving to Melbourne to take what you know from Phoenix, right? You’re moving there to learn as well. And then what you learned you take to the new place.
Another counter-trend that I’m interested in started before COVID — the push for online companies to get into the offline world. Whether that’s Amazon opening a brick and mortar or Away luggage starting a print magazine. I’m interested to see if that continues since offline has a higher cost barrier than online.
I’m interested to see if there’s a setting where different experiences and offerings will be bundled together. There is one physical example of this that is really interesting — a space in Copenhagen called the Audo that’s a mixed use space. It’s a boutique hotel with a cafe, a restaurant, a co-working space, a concept store, a library, and a creative space where photographers can go and do photo shoots. I feel like we’re likely to see more hybrid solutions. The margins on any one of those individual businesses may not be sufficient, so they’re making a space that serves multiple purposes and creates different revenue streams.
JS: Self-sustaining.
Self-sustaining is going to be paramount going forward. There’s obviously a conversation around sustainability and what that means. But I say self-sustaining, because even tech, for example, we’re seeing a trend where more and more of the funding, the VC, has gone later-stage, and an investor would rather write a $50 million or $100 million check for a start-up that’s already grown to a certain point rather than writing 10 smaller checks or 100 smaller checks.
I think you’re gonna have more people learning how to build something that’s self-sustaining instead of trying to find some outside source, either for funding or for amplification through social or press. I think people are gonna be thinking a little bit smaller in terms of how to validate if the thing they’re focused on is working. At the same time, I think people are gonna be looking for ways to not rely so much on outside influence or resources. Businesses are doing that, too. 10 years ago, companies didn’t have in-house people doing things like social media or content. Now you have companies as big as Pepsi building their own in-house agencies. So I think businesses, big and small, are going to be trying to push themselves to get more self-sustaining.
Even nonprofits are doing this. I’m on a couple of nonprofit boards and we’re thinking less and less about how we get people to donate money and more and more about how we generate earned income through our own revenue. So even nonprofits are moving into a place where they’re trying to become more self-sustaining.
About Localeur
Localeur is a global community of diverse creatives, tastemakers, and restless travelers who seek to promote authenticity through an emphasis on local. They are the authority on where to eat, drink & play in 180+ cities — online and off.
About Joah
Joah Spearman founded Localeur in 2013 after serving as the director of operations and strategic initiatives for Bazaarvoice in the leadup to their 2012 IPO. Joah has led Localeur’s expansion to more than 180 cities serving 5 million travelers around the world, along with partnerships with leading brands such as Nike, Match.com, Lyft, JetBlue Airways and HotelTonight. He is one of the only black tech founders in history to raise $5 million for a startup without institutional VC firms having secured investments from Hong Kong-based Red Sails Investments, Central Texas Angel Network, Houston Angel Network, Cowtown Angels, Alamo Angels, and Capital Factory along with noted angel investors such as data.world founder Brett Hurt, WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner, and Silicon Labs CEO Tyson Tuttle.
Joah has been named one of LinkedIn’s top influencers for entrepreneurship for three years, a Top 10 Black Innovators of 2014 by Movement 50, Emerging Business Leader of the Year by the Greater Austin Black Chamber, and is a five-time finalist for the Austin Under 40 Awards. A graduate of UT-Austin, Joah serves on the board of directors for Austin’s PBS (KLRU) and ZACH Theatre, and is the past board chair of AIDS Services of Austin.
If you want to contribute to any of the nonprofits Joah works with, links are below:
Reserve your ticket for Future Sessions on September 29th at 5:30pm CT. This free event is part of World Interaction Design Day (IxDD), presented by Adobe and IxDA.
And follow us here at Perspectives on Design as we share interviews with Elizabeth Gore, Meetesh Karia, Callie Thompson, and Angela Wong. Last week’s interview featuring Diana Griffin from Nava — read it here.
