Riparide co-founder Nate Sampimon on the storytelling approach that helps the startup offer a better experience for guests and hosts

Nate Sampimon founded Melbourne startup accelerator in Angelcube and Australia’s first co-working space in Inspire9. He remains actively involved in the startup space and, around five or six years ago met Riparide co-founder Marlon Law.

Riparide, an accommodation booking site, is “about helping people find fulfilling moments in nature. We’re all about driving people into regional areas for short nature escapes,” Sampimon says.

Its strategy is led by storytelling, sending members of the brand’s community to stay at sites and capture fulfilling moments at Riparide escapes.

“They find all these epic adventures to do in and around the accommodation they stay at, and they bring that back into the platform, and publish a story.

“That story drives inspiration through our traveller community, and then they pick and choose what adventures they want to add to their itinerary, and then book an escape based on that,” Sampimon explains.

But this storyteller model delivers so much more than good marketing material for Riparide and its hosts and travellers. It fosters connections between people, their hosts and the regional spaces and communities in which they find themselves.

Sampimon joins the Smart50 Awards this year as a guest judge for the Regional Category, where we celebrate business leaders in regional areas that are getting involved with their communities with support for local initiatives or boosting regional economies with jobs and opportunities.

Here, he does some storytelling of his own, filling us in on the background of Riparide’s success and discussing the changing nature of the relationship between people from the city and the country.

Where did the storytelling approach come from?

The genesis story of Riparide is that Marlon, my co-founder, grew up down the surf coast. He was out in the water every day. He’s a keen surfer and just loves the environment down there. Later on in life, he moved into the city, met his wife, had a couple of kids and got stuck in the daily grind of full-time work and parenting and all the rest of it. And he found himself needing to escape the city to get that ‘top up’ of nature. He noticed that every time he went down there for weekends to where he grew up, he’d come back feeling more fulfilled, a bit more energetic and a bit more himself.

He ended up finding a property down there, and he pitched this 16-foot teepee. And on this epic property that overlooks Bells Beach, that had kangaroos, epic landscapes, bush environment, and these scenic views of the Bells Beach sunrise – it’s really quite incredible, the scenery and the experience.

He decided that would be something he’d like other people to experience, essentially. That’s where the idea came from; it was ‘how do we get people out of the city into these areas to get these top-ups of fulfilment?’ So he invited a storyteller called Hayden O’Neill, who’s a photographer down on surf coast, quite well known. It was like an adventure for O’Neill, he came along, and basically did the story shoot. We didn’t know it at the time but he sort of captured the teepee, and then a lot of the things to do around the area.

That was the first story that was on Riparide. It was centred on that concept of how important it is to get out of the city into nature. O’Neill was the first storyteller, he came along and really captured it in a way that turned it from being just Law grabbing his phone and trying to shoot the teepee, into a bit more of a story of adventure orientation. 

From there, we’ve been sort of diving into it as a company recently. After the first few of those that went up, Law found a few more, and you can sort of see where we realised the concept was working.

There was one particular young woman on Instagram who was down in Wilsons Promontory, and that was one of the other first stories that was on the site. She tagged us on Insta and said, ‘Oh, down here after hearing some ripper stories, was really awesome’. We reached out and said, ‘looks amazing, how did you find the spot?’ and she replied, ‘Oh, I was inspired by one of the stories on Riparide’. For us, that was really reaffirming, just that action of sharing these authentic stories.

O’Neill does this adventure style photography all the time anyway right? But we just get to light that up through our storytelling engine at Riparide. He gets to create a really authentic version of what his weekend escape would be, and our job is just to share that and amplify that story.

There’s a sense of connection to nature and space for travellers, what does it mean for hosts?

Hosts often talk about the difference in the types of travellers. We call them travellers — I guess they’re customers for the host. They come through, they’re just a different type of person, they’re more of an adventurer type, they’re there to seek out the region and that’s a really amazing place around which to interact with someone.

Oftentimes these hosts are either city folk or country folk, who have fallen in love with a plot of land or a house, or something like that, and they have a really strong connection to their place. And so, there’s something cool that happens with the traveller where they get to come together around the story behind the place and what makes it cool, sharing all the epic adventures around the area.

Hosts are really proud of their accommodations, right? It’s incredible, the connection; they oftentimes have a very personal connection to how it all came to be.

One of our hosts, Sam, has the Cabin at Kevington, which is in the high country of Victoria. Her father or grandfather bought that cabin, I think, way back in the day. It has been in her family for ages. There was a time when her family was going to have to sell it, and she scrimped and saved for ages, and ended up buying the place, and is so proud of it it. It’s such an important part of her history and her family values. And she gets to share that on Riparide.

Every time you go to the C for a Riparide escape, Sam will send you all of the exciting things to do around the area that she’s been doing since she was a kid. There’s a really interesting relationship between hosts and travellers, and it is a very different interaction than you would have on other platforms.

What’s your take on the changes to the relationships people have with regional areas and communities in the past few years?

Certainly, it has been an amazing, incredible ride over the last three years.

We had bushfires in the early 2020s and years before that as well. We had floods, and then COVID-19 hit, so it has been a hard time for so many folks in regional areas. We’ve seen people share their stories around how that’s impacted on their livelihoods. There are people who were uprooted and moved to other areas because they haven’t been able to afford their lifestyle, or their house has been devastated, or whatever might have happened. So there are real stories there, of real people, in pretty significantly dire situations. 

But then what we see off the back of international disasters is the folks in cities really yearning to get out into those spaces. So it shifts, and you start to see this massive swell of people who want to get out into nature. After every lockdown, Sydney and Melbourne people were just crazy for it. They obviously couldn’t get enough of just getting out of the city, where they’d been barricaded in with a five kilometre radius for months at a time.

So, it was a real opportunity to connect those two communities — those communities of people who really needed this experience in nature, and this community of regional folks who had such a rough time financially, personally, and everything in between.

One of our values is community is at the heart of everything we do. And so our host community, we think about them as a community of people, rather than just providers. And we really leaned into that community during each of those natural disasters, and pandemics.

It has been a hard time but I think that personal connection, and that community orientation, is something that has allowed us to stay strong and provide opportunities to all these hosts to transform the story over the last few years into something more positive.

Enter the Regional Category of the Smart50 Awards here.