Experience Sellers Have No Shopify – Until Now

01 /The Concept

Millions of experience sellers – instructors, tour guides, winery hosts, boutique hotels – run businesses that exist entirely offline but increasingly need to sell online. Understory gives them the full stack to do it.

The target audience includes instructors running in-person classes in art, crafts, yoga, cooking, and anything else; guides leading city tours and outdoor expeditions; restaurants and wineries hosting tasting events; and guesthouses or boutique hotels in tourist areas.

These businesses can quickly build a website on Understory that doubles as an online storefront for their offerings.

Three modules do the work. A booking system sells exact available inventory – right number of tickets, right open dates – and surfaces a CRM and calendar view of all transactions. A marketing layer runs targeted ad campaigns, distributes across experience marketplaces, handles email to segmented CRM lists, and manages direct prospect outreach. An analytics module ties marketing spend to actual bookings, so businesses can see what's generating revenue and what's just generating noise.

Pricing: free tier plus 3.5% of bookings, or $99/month plus 3% of bookings. Enterprise rates for higher volumes are available on request.

Understory is originally from Denmark – where it was previously called Holdbar, [covered previously](/review/bolshie-dengi-na-malenkih-prodavcah-vpechatlenij) when it launched. The platform now serves around 500 businesses. Not a huge number – but the company just raised €12M, nearly four times its previous round.

02 /Why It Matters

The size of that round reflects investor conviction in a growing market.

Consumer spending on experiences – entertainment, travel, sports, education, cultural events – has been steadily taking share from spending on physical goods. By 2022, spending on experiences had already outpaced goods spending by more than two to one, and the trend continues to accelerate.

Conventional wisdom has always treated travel as the dominant experiences market. But the data tells a different story: tourists spend around $239 billion in the places they visit, while local non-tourism experiences generate $1.1 trillion.

And "non-tourism" is a misleading label. Local tourism – discovering new experiences in your own city or nearby on a weekend – is actually much larger than international travel, which most people think of as "real" tourism.

Looking at the tourism spending breakdown: local experiences accounted for $4.1B in 2023, regional trips $0.9B, and cross-regional travel $0.5B. By 2030, those figures are projected to reach $6B, $1.7B, and $0.9B respectively.

Zooming out to all travel-related spending, McKinsey estimates that experiences represent approximately 25% of total outlay. In absolute terms, the experiences market within travel alone is worth $1.1–1.3 trillion.

Experience sellers also enjoy significantly higher margins than sellers of traditional travel products like ticket resellers or hotel bookers. Margins for experience providers can reach 60% even after commissions – which means they have plenty of room to pay for platforms that help them sell more.

Yet most experience selling still happens offline, through word of mouth and foot traffic. Getting these businesses online – with proper booking flows, marketing automation, and analytics – remains a wide-open opportunity.

Easol ([related review](/review/prodavcy-vpechatlenij)) built a comparable platform and raised $29.6M, though its last round was in 2021. Based on its website and social activity, it appears to be operating and growing.

Lovetovisit ([related review](/review/turizm-jeto-ne-to-chto-ty-dumal)) built a marketplace for booking experiences and events in the UK and raised £5.8M, including £3.2M last August.

Bandwango ([related review](/review/kak-nazhat-na-administrativnyj-rychag)) created an app for purchasing local experiences – museums, amusement parks, restaurants, wineries, local attractions – in destination areas and raised $9.2M.

03 /Opportunities

Experiences are a subset of the broader services market – a sector that is enormous, underdigitized, and riddled with friction. Finding, buying, and receiving services at the expected quality is often an ordeal. Physical retail largely solved this problem. Services will follow. Building digital infrastructure for service markets is an obvious and durable opportunity.

But experience selling has a feature that sets it apart from most other services.

Many services are purchased infrequently – custom furniture when you move, international travel once or twice a year. Experiences, if they're affordable and local, can be impulse buys. See an interesting cooking class on a Saturday morning? Book it for next weekend before the feeling passes.

That means experience sellers' revenue is highly responsive to marketing reach and purchase simplicity. The businesses that can be found easily and booked in seconds win disproportionately.

The most interesting opportunity here is therefore building the platforms that make that discovery and conversion seamless – with marketing automation that effectively runs on autopilot.