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Check out the 17-page Notion memo that Dharma, a travel startup for creators and brands, used to raise $4.7 million
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- Travel startup Dharma recently raised a $4.7 million pre-Series A funding round.
- The company helps creators and brands put together curated travel experiences.
- Here’s the Notion memo the cofounders used when pitching potential investors.
Dharma, a travel startup that plans and sells trips hosted by creators and brands, recently announced $4.7 million in pre-Series A funding.
The round was led by the San Francisco-based VC fund Convivialite Ventures, with participation from FJ Labs, as well as billionaire Stephen Ross, who owns fitness brands Equinox and SoulCycle.
Other notable angel investors included Matt Higgins from Shark Tank and football icon Eric Cantona.
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Dharma cofounder and CEO Charaf El Mansouri told Insider the company aims to support creators and brands in organizing exclusive travel experiences by dealing with operations and liaising with local travel operators as needed.
The company was born with the idea of facilitating wellness retreats, but has expanded into running, wine, and has plans to launch food and even dodgeball-focused experiences.
“If I’m a yoga teacher and I have 5,000, 500,000, 5 million people in my community, I have a huge audience that I can monetize via travel experiences, and that are willing to pay a premium to travel with me for my retreats,” he said. “By definition, I’m a yoga teacher, not a professional travel manager. We came in as this travel brand, a service offering where we do all of the heavy lifting.”
Dharma recently partnered with Paramount Global to launch “Paris by Emily,” the first official travel experience for Netflix series “Emily in Paris,” and has helped creators like fitness influencer Kelsey Wells and brands like Pernod Ricard host trips.
The company’s big challenge ahead, which the funds from the raise will be used for, is to achieve scale. El Mansouri said his team plans to introduce more automation in the trip-planning and booking process, and to attract bigger and better partnerships to increase revenue.
Here is the 17-page Notion memo that the cofounders used to raise $4.7 million.
Note: the memo has been redacted to remove some confidential information, including booked revenue, details on product strategy, and the company’s growth targets.
The first slide introduces the company and the idea that ‘the future of travel is passion-led.’
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El Mansouri had originally started pitching investors using a deck, but then created a memo after a few investor calls.
“Someone told me, ‘In California today or in San Francisco today, no one’s using decks anymore. They just do memos.’ I had a deck, so I have a deck and I made a memo too,” he said.
The memo gets into Dharma’s value proposition.
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An image explains the stages of organizing a trip with Dharma: surveying the creator’s audience, selecting a trip, advertising it to sign up guests, and traveling.
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The following slide provides more insight into each step of the process of planning a trip with Dharma.
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Then, the memo describes who the stakeholders are in Dharma’s ecosystem — creators, guests, and travel operators — and their challenges.
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The memo also explains how the company plans to solve these challenges.
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A graph explains how the process of planning and fulfilling a trip works with Dharma.
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A case study for one of Dharma’s creator experiences, a retreat with fitness influencer Kelsey Wells, provides an example of success.
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The following pages get into the ‘why now’ of Dharma: up first, ‘consumer travel distribution is broken.’
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Then, ‘the rise and rise of the creator economy.’
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The third point around the ‘why now’ is that ‘creators want to own their revenue,’ and the fourth that ‘customers want to spend on moments, not things.’
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A chart shows how creators currently earn revenue, and introduces the next point: ‘belonging is the new luxury.’
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A chart shows how friendship is declining, supporting the point that Dharma will enable people to build meaningful relationships through their trips.
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This slide aims to explain Dharma’s success so far, by highlighting it achieved a ‘Net Promoter Score’ of 89 from 405 guests who attended Dharma trips.
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The next page explains how Dharma plans to reach its goal of 10,000 guest bookings, and briefly introduces the company’s founding team.
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The team is composed of four cofounders, and is primarily female.
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The last slide introduces some notable investors.
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