How this small-town engineer built Thrillophilia into a Rs 500-cr brand without a playbook

Before Thrillophilia became a ₹500-crore travel platform, it was simply the dream of a small-town engineer who never planned a career in tourism.

Abhishek Daga, cofounder of Thrillophilia an IIT-BHU graduate, who grew up in Jaipur began his professional life in the high-tech corridors of Cisco, first as an IT engineer and later as part of the company’s Global Innovation Program.

His first deep exposure to how digital storytelling could influence consumer behaviour came only later, when he moved to Eulogy Media and worked on digital strategy for brands like IPL, Royal Challengers Bangalore, Discovery Channel, Flying Machine and initiatives led by Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw. This was long before concepts like influencer marketing or creator virality were mainstream in India, Abhishek recalled.

But it was only in 2011 when the real turning point came, as he and his wife Chitra decided to walk away from their corporate careers and build something from scratch. What they saw was a glaring whitespace in India: incredible experiences and adventure operators existed across the country, but almost none were bookable online in a reliable, standardised format. Quality fluctuated, queues were long, safety was inconsistent, and while hotels were already being solved by the MakeMyTrips of the world, the very thing people travelled for, things to do, wasn’t organised at all.

 
With no funding, no GTM playbook and no blueprint to follow, Abhishek, along with Chitra rented a small space in Bangalore and set out to digitise and organise a segment that wasn’t even recognised as a “sector” yet. There were no dashboards, CAC metrics or funnel experiments in those early days, just grit. “We weren’t following a marketing playbook, we were building one without realising it,” Abhishek told e4m in an exclusive interview.

When Marketing Was Just Conviction, Not Budget

In the early days of launching the brand, Abhishek had no clarity on what would scale. There were no funnels to optimise, no CAC benchmarks to reference, and no “growth team”. He was doing everything including stalking travel forums to understand demand behaviour, replying to every enquiry personally, calling adventure operators across India to convince them to list on the platform, and running zero-budget digital experiments just to see what would convert. Growth wasn’t a function then, he said.

To generate the first few users, Abhishek leveraged early-stage social media platforms. Facebook had a program that offered $100 in free ad credits to new ad accounts, so, Abhishek asked friends and family to create those accounts, redeemed every credit possible, and funnelled all of it into ads driving traffic to Thrillophilia’s pages. Simultaneously, Twitter became an always-on growth channel. His team tracked travel-related conversations like people planning trips to Goa, Manali, Ladakh, Rishikesh, even Thailand, and personally jumped into threads with curated recommendations and bookings on Thrillophilia. Traffic didn’t magically come; it was hunted, he said.

Next, Abhishek built reach manually as he had no marketing playbook or ad money. He wrote long-form blogs about adventure travel when SEO wasn’t a buzzword, listed experiences on every discovery portal he could find, plugged Thrillophilia links inside backpacker Facebook groups, and messaged travel influencers individually because affiliate platforms did not exist. Every click mattered, and if one content piece drove even a single enquiry, he would double down on it until it started compounding.

For 30 days straight, he tracked every inquiry on an Excel sheet, called travellers to understand why they didn’t complete bookings, asked hosts what prevented them from accepting online requests, and continuously rewrote product pages based on that feedback. 

What Thrillophilia eventually became was not a “travel content site” or a “travel booking site”, but content-commerce at scale, where information, inspiration and purchase happen on the same platform. The blogs pulled travellers in, the itineraries educated them, the credibility converted them, and the post-booking support brought them back. Storytelling became acquisition. Looking back, Abhishek said there was no brand strategy deck that predicted any of this. “We weren’t following a marketing playbook, we were accidentally writing one,” he stated.

When Thrillophilia Came Close To Shutting Down

But this wasn’t it. Beyond being just another content-heavy travel blog, Thrillophilia ran almost entirely on hustle for the first five years. It grew on SEO when almost nobody cared about SEO, cracked Facebook groups when advertisers ignored community play, and used storytelling when influencer marketing wasn’t even an industry. And for a while, that scrappy engine worked.

Until the market changed.

 By 2016–17, several early startups in the space were shutting down because the era of patient, organic growth was over. Competition intensified aggressively and OTAs began positioning “experiences” as an add-on revenue vertical, deep-discounted copycats entered the market, CPCs skyrocketed, and adventure travel suddenly became a category every travel company wanted to own.

 Abhishek mentioned that Thrillophilia had expanded rapidly across geographies and onboarded hundreds of vendors, but internally, systems hadn’t matured at the same pace. Next, he knew operational lapses resulted in cancellations, high-ticket complaints, and erosion of trust started. “It wasn’t a funding crisis, it was a unit economics crisis,” Abhishek recalled. For the first time, burning money seemed easier than fixing the model. And briefly, shutting down felt like the less painful option.

The founders decided to hit pause and rebuilt the business from the inside. Over the next year, they slowed down expansion, pruned low-quality vendors, doubled down only on markets with strong unit economics, and shifted their internal philosophy from be the biggest catalogue to be the most reliable one. Strict SOPs were introduced before any experience could go live, and a non-negotiable rule was adopted during this phase: if an experience could not be executed with certainty, Thrillophilia would not sell it.

“That phase permanently rewired our DNA,” the founder said. “It taught us that scale should be an outcome of reliability, not a replacement for it.” He also added that this reset changed their expansion playbook: instead of going wide first, Thrillophilia would only enter markets where it could guarantee supply depth, safety compliance, and repeat demand, even if it meant slower rollouts.

Now, instead of chasing GMV, the company focussed on predictability and repeatability. Refunds fell and NPS surged. Over time, that discipline, not discounts, not aggressive ad spend, powered the scale, said the founder.

 This further unlocked that brand’s next orbit of growth. The travel platform that once ran on manual hustle has today evolved into a ₹500-crore experiential travel platform, and has served over 3 million+ users.

 
The Marketing Pivot

As the brand scaled and struggled to reach sustainable growth, Abhishek’s view of marketing changed radically. In the early days, marketing was simply whatever brought the next 100 users. But over time he realised that the metric wasn’t traffic anymore, it was predictable, profitable retention. And that meant marketing had to evolve too.

In the early 2010s, Thrillophilia could grow on intuition because CPCs were negligible, content discovery was organic and one blog could drive lakhs of sessions. But that era didn’t last. Between 2019 and 2021, the company began rebuilding its marketing muscle from the ground up.“Reliability became our product, and word-of-mouth became our marketing,” Abhishek said. Performance pods replaced individual marketers, attribution replaced assumptions, and CRM funnels replaced one-size-fits-all communication.

 An AI-led optimisation layer was introduced that reacted to user behaviour in real time, not just based on what users clicked, but what they were most likely to buy, experience and return for. That phase marked Thrillophilia’s shift from experimentation-led growth to a repeatable, predictable and profitable retention engine.

Today, Abhishek describes modern marketing as a convergence of creativity and intelligence. The goal is no longer volume, but profitable conversions, predictive analytics and hyper-personalised user journeys.

 
Today, Thrillophilia’s marketing stack looks nothing like a traditional performance team. The company allocates around ₹12 crore annually to performance marketing, but the spend philosophy is opposite to most scaled consumer brands: no discounted CAC, no ad-led growth hacks, no “blitzscale or die” mindset. Every rupee is justified by lifetime value, and every campaign is optimised for retention before acquisition. Abhishek describes the new philosophy as “marketing that begins only after the first booking.”

The brand no longer chases traffic; it chases the probability that a traveller returns for the next trip, and the one after that. In other words, Abhishek said, Thrillophilia doesn’t market what people click, it markets what people can trust will happen exactly as promised.

Abhishek believes the success formula is no longer audience, content or channels. It is precision, every quarter, the marketing playbook must evolve, because user psychology evolves faster than platforms.