Travel Diaries

The shift came quickly. New paid subscriptions roughly doubled in my first four months, and the curve continued to steepen through to my departure. Renewal volume grew 31% year on year across the same window, which mattered structurally because retention is the only kind of growth that compounds without continuous spend.

Underneath the numbers, the more important change was structural. When I joined, the company effectively had one revenue stream. By the time I left, it had seven: web subscriptions and app subscriptions across both products (Travel Diaries and Baby Diaries), printed books, gift cards, productized B2B branded content, productized B2B partnerships, and a Lemlist-driven outbound pipeline that did not exist before. The business stopped being a single-channel bet.

The trajectory was the cumulative effect of the rebrand, the operating system, the partnerships engine, and the in-house growth team that replaced the agency dependencies. This pillar is the topline they produced. The rest of the document is how.

Revenue existed and was growing, but it was scattered with no consolidated view. There was no weekly or monthly reporting cadence, no KPI ownership, and no framework for reading the business at a glance. Internally, most communication on Slack happened in private channels and DMs, which meant decisions were invisible and context was lost.

I built the operating system across two layers.

The first was the metrics layer. I created a comprehensive company KPI sheet, tracked weekly and monthly across all revenue streams and core customer operations, including refunds, ticket volume, and average response time. The sheet was rolled out organization-wide and became the shared source of truth for the business's performance.

The second was the communication layer. I restructured Slack from the ground up: clear channel taxonomy by team and topic, defaults for public over private, and explicit norms for how information should flow. Within a week of the new policies going live, public communication volume increased visibly and stayed there. We introduced written weekly stand-ups, and I wrote a full company handbook covering onboarding, holiday policy, communication norms, calendar usage, and the SOPs the team had been operating without.

The systems were lightweight enough to survive turnover, and they did. One year after I left, the company is still running on them.

The first step was diagnostic. I audited the active campaigns and the agency's reporting and found the metrics being shared with the company did not reconcile with what was actually happening in the platforms. We were spending without a clear view of return, and the strategy itself had no geographic ambition beyond the existing user base.

I cut both the mobile acquisition agency and a separate Instagram-focused social agency that was producing no measurable return, either. Together, those two decisions freed up the budget that had been compounding into nothing for months.

In their place, we built an international go-to-market strategy from scratch, anchored on three in-house channels: SEO, paid ads, and ASO. Everything ran internally, which gave us full visibility into spend, attribution, and creative performance for the first time. The strategy was designed for the US and UK specifically, rather than treating either as an extension of the Dutch market, which meant rebuilding keyword targeting, ad creative, and store listings against local user behavior rather than translating Dutch assets.

The results showed up in ASO first. Within the first five months in role, the Travel Diaries app went from negligible organic search visibility in both markets to ranking in the top 100 for 160 keywords in the US and 95 in the UK, with strong representation in the top 10 in both. Search Visibility Score grew several hundred percent in each market over the same window. The shift in user mix followed: when I joined, the majority of our mobile users were Dutch. By the time I left, the majority were in the US.

PolarSteps, our main competitor, was visually years ahead, and the gap was starting to affect how the product was perceived in market. SEO suffered from the fragmented architecture, and every new page required custom work.

The rebrand needed to solve three problems simultaneously: refresh Travel Diaries to compete on visual quality, establish a coherent identity for the umbrella company Journal Lab, and create a brand system that could absorb sister brands without rework. Baby Diaries, the second product in the portfolio, was scoped into the same project from the start.

I owned the project end-to-end. We developed the new visual direction across all three brands, ensuring each had its own personality while sharing a system that signaled they belonged to the same company. We directed and produced an original photoshoot in the Netherlands with a local photographer to replace stock imagery and give each brand a distinct visual language rooted in real travel and family moments.

On the web side, we rebuilt the site architecture in Squidex with a component-first approach. Every component was designed for reuse across page types and flexible enough to support both static and dynamic content. The Figma system was spec'd component-by-component for the front-end developers, and I oversaw the build phase to ensure the implementation preserved the design intent and incorporated SEO and content management requirements from day one.

The result was a brand system now powering three products under one umbrella, and a website that could scale without engineering involvement for new pages.

The voucher experiment had failed for a structural reason: travel agencies could not articulate what they were getting beyond free product their customers might or might not use. There was no perk hierarchy, no placement value, no co-marketing logic, and no reason for a partner to invest in the relationship.

I rebuilt partnerships as a productized offering with defined tiers and tangible value at every level. The new website architecture supported this directly: every page was structured around a location or sub-location, which gave us inventory we could actually sell. Travel agencies offering tours received prominent placement on the relevant location pages, in the public diaries shared by their customers, and on the back covers of physical books shipped to those customers. Higher tiers unlocked additional perks: inclusion in branded ebooks, SEO-focused branded content on the blog, influencer collaborations, and custom packages tailored to specific partner objectives. The rebrand was partly triggered by this work, because the old architecture could not support a productized partnerships offering.

With the product side built, we built the sales side to match. I set up an outbound system on Lemlist with automated sequences targeting DMOs and travel agencies, defined the B2B KPIs and pipeline metrics that the sales function would be measured against, and gave the team the materials and process to operate without the CEO in every conversation. The result was that Travel Diaries had a sales function for the first time. We also brought the brand to the field, presenting at WTM London and ITB Berlin to build a pipeline and category presence with the buyers we wanted to reach.

The year I left, B2B revenue closed nearly double the previous year.

The structural problem was that the CEO's time was consumed by product and engineering coordination, even though her highest-leverage activity was B2B sales, particularly in Europe, where her network was significantly stronger. Taking on product ownership was the trade that unlocked her. I stepped in as product owner, took on the engineering side end-to-end, and freed her to focus on the partnerships and commercial conversations that only she could lead.

The first move was tooling. I migrated the team from Jira to Linear, which gave us a system the developers would actually use and the visibility the rest of the company needed. From there, I established the operating rhythm: defined cycle lengths, estimation practices, sprint structure, and a weekly cross-functional meeting where product priorities, marketing requirements, and engineering capacity were aligned in the same room rather than negotiated in side conversations.

I led the development team directly: one backend developer, one frontend developer, and one mobile developer. The cadence took three to four months to settle, and by that point, the change was visible. We could see where development time was going, who was working on what, and what was actually shipping against what had been promised. Accountability became structural rather than personal, which is the only kind of accountability that scales.

The unlock was not the process itself. It was what the process made possible: a string of platform improvements across both web and app that had been blocked for months by the previous setup, shipped on a predictable cadence once the operating model was in place. And on the other side of the company, the CEO finally had room to do the work that only she could do.

I left Travel Diaries on my own terms, primarily to protect the company's financials. The systems I had built needed time to compound, and the company needed runway more than it needed another senior salary on the books. Stepping away was the most sustainable decision for the business at that moment: the foundations were in place, the trajectory was set, and continuing to draw a senior cost while those foundations matured would have worked against the very runway I had been hired to extend.

A funding round closed shortly after, and the operational, partnerships, and growth infrastructure I had set up continued compounding into the following year, with full-year GMV closing nearly 40% above the year I joined and B2B revenue nearly double. One year on, the operating system, the KPI framework, and the partnerships engine are all still in use.

The most honest measure of the work is not what I did while I was there. It is what kept working after I left.