How Travel Media Company Bucketlisters recouped lost profits from COVID

• Bucketlisters sells city travel experiences to young adults in cities around the world.
• The company now has 1.2 million followers on its main Instagram and thousands of views on TikTok.
• Here’s how the company pivoted its business model during COVID to grow beyond pre-pandemic levels.

When the world shut down in 2020 due to COVID, Bucketlisters, then a series of social media-based travel accounts, felt the effects almost immediately. In three months, the company lost more than 90% of its gross profits.

Now, less than two years later, the company is stronger than it’s ever been, averaging $200,000 in gross profit for each of the past three months thanks to a new business model.

Bucketlisters was originally founded in 2011 as an online travel blog promoting experiences for adventurous types — an exciting project for Lederman, who had just graduated and started working in finance in Chicago.

The company switched to a social media advertising model in 2013 with the launch of its Instagram, which promoted interesting events, classes and social gatherings. in Chicago, and garnered thousands of followers in its first two years. When Lederman moved to New York to work in 2017, he opened another account, @nybucketlist.

The following year, Lederman quit his job, hoping to turn his Instagram into a full-fledged social media business.

For two years, Lederman and his team invested in growing their media business. They’ve built their social media business on ads, with local experience providers, like helicopter tours and sailboat charters, and bigger companies, like Live Nation and American Airlines, paying a set fee to promote. on Bucketlisters channels. At the start of 2020, the company was making an average gross profit of $150,000 per month.

But when the pandemic effectively shut down all travel and live events, advertisers, who had nothing left to promote on social media, began to back out of their contracts, Lederman told Insider.

With his business counting down, Lederman had to find a new way to fund and save the business.

The team first turned to drive-thru movies, which began to make a comeback as indoor operations came to a halt during the pandemic.

They first contacted the owner of ChiTown Films, just outside of Chicago, to ask if he would like to advertise on the Bucketlisters platform. After some backdoor negotiation, the Bucketlisters decided to try a “centralized performance-based marketplace” model: the theater would give Bucketlisters tickets to sell to its subscribers, and the Bucketlisters would take a cut of the ticket revenue.

This new model provided them with an alternative source of income to recover from the pandemic. Within a year, the company was able to regain its pandemic-era losses.

As the world began to open up this spring, Bucketlisters was able to take on some advertisers again, including big names like

netflix

Disney, Facebook and Starbucks.

Bucketlisters now profit from a combination of ticket sales for these events and social media advertising spots.

The company now operates in 12 major US cities, including Los Angeles, Austin and Miami, as well as Toronto, London and Paris. Its main Instagram hub @bucketlisters has 1.2 million subscribers and its city-specific pages each have tens of thousands of subscribers.

The company’s next stage of expansion will focus on launching a creative program, Lederman said. The company will pay Instagram and TikTok creators, as well as give them access to Bucketlisters events, in hopes of developing the next generation of travel influencers.

“Going from media to market was the best decision I’ve ever made,” Lederman said. “We learned with the market – we actually harness the power of our platform into something we own and can monetize.”