• Boston Business Journal, Wednesday, February 12, 2014 2:26 PM

On a whim, Boston resident Derek Bugley reached out to a writer on an online travel forum in 2010 to seek out the best attractions for his upcoming trip to Namibia, Africa.

Within an hour, he received elaborate advice ranging from which street vendors were selling the best art and antiquities to which watering holes were best-suited for spotting lions, and which roads to avoid.

Bugley's newfound travel friend didn't ask for anything in return.

"It's not rocket science, but he and I were never connected before, and he had so much knowledge that he was giving away for free," Bugley said.

That unfair exchange of precious insider travel tips led Bugley to launch Boston-based Buggl, a website that allows experienced travel writers and casual travelers to design their own online travel guides and sell them for a nominal fee.

Guides are priced by the authors and range from free to about $25, but Bugley said the "sweet spot" is $9.99.

Since the beta site launched in early February, about 150 authors have uploaded 200 guides with titles such as, "The beer lover's guide to San Diego," "The ultimate Breaking Bad tour of Albuquerque," and "The ultimate hipster guide to Tel Aviv."

The site has been visited more than 20,000 times so far this month, Bugley said.

The startup's advisors include Steve King, formerly director of media sales for Facebook (at the company's early Boston office). King is currently general partner at Second & Fourth, a Newburyport-based startup advising and seed-funding firm.

Also advising Buggl is Dan Abdinoor, former engineering manager and lead developer for Cambridge-based HubSpot.

The startup is backed by $175,000 in in-kind engineering and development services and $60,000 in cash from two unnamed angel investors, Bugley said.

Buggl makes money by charging a transaction fee of 20 percent every time a travel guide is sold.

Goals for the startup include building a mobile app this summer and getting 500 travel guides on the site by the end of the year, Bugley said.

"We could be the leading site in about 20 major destinations around the world that are hard-to-reach travel destinations," he said.

Those might include Myanmar and Borneo in Asia, and Namibia in Africa, Bugley said.

Bugley hopes that travel writers and photographers will get more visibility through the site, even if they give away their insider travel guides for free.

"There's a lot of different ways this can evolve," he said.

Buggl currently works out of the MassChallenge offices in Boston and the Cambridge Innovation Center. The startup is run by Bugley and two other co-founders. They are Richard Walton, formerly founder and CEO of ecotourism company GVI International, and Troy Peden, chairman of study-abroad site GoAbroad.com.

Read the whole story at Boston Business Journal »