1. What is your company in 2–5 words?

Gamified bin-mapping for travellers.

2. Why is now the time for your company to exist?

Sustainability has never been more front-of-mind for young travellers — but most "green" tech is preachy and dull, so it doesn't actually change behaviour. Meanwhile, gamification and community apps have proven they can drive real-world action at scale. KrapMaps sits right at that intersection: it takes a moment where caring about the planet is culturally urgent and makes doing the right thing genuinely fun. The tools (smartphones, maps, AI verification) and the audience (a generation that wants to travel and do good) have both finally caught up.

3. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We're small, scrappy, and we've actually lived the problem. I built KrapMaps after ten months backpacking Southeast Asia — this isn't a boardroom idea, it came from standing on a beautiful beach with rubbish in my hand and nowhere to put it. My co-founder runs our content and community. We don't have big-company resources, but we've got the two things that matter: we genuinely care, and we move fast. Best of all, we're building something we'd use ourselves.

4. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Honestly, probably still travelling — and getting annoyed that an app like KrapMaps didn't exist. I've always been a builder; if it wasn't this, it'd be another product fixing something that bugged me. But I can't really picture not building. This is the thing I want to give everything to.

5. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?

Real-world impact over vanity numbers. Day-to-day: bins mapped by the community (800+ across 29 countries), how many get verified, and how active our mappers are week to week. We also watch partnership momentum — hostels onboarded, ambassadors signed — because that's what drives growth. Long-term, the test is simple: are there more bins on the map, is there less litter around them, and is the community growing? Revenue follows engagement, so engagement is what we obsess over.

6. In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?

For travellers: a free, fun app to find a public bin wherever you are, plus a community mission to be part of — map bins, earn rewards, help hit shared goals. For partners: hostels get a feel-good guest activity and a genuine sustainability story; brands get to sponsor real environmental action in front of an engaged travel audience; and councils and tourism boards get on-the-ground bin-infrastructure data they can't easily source elsewhere.

7. What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

The partnerships. We went from an idea to live across all 24 Mad Monkey Hostels properties in Southeast Asia — the biggest hostel brand in the region — as their launch partner. That one relationship has opened doors to more: press features, inbound interest, and proof that a bin-mapping app can genuinely earn a place in the travel world. The most exciting part isn't a number — it's that people who don't have to care about us keep saying yes.

8. Where do you think your growth will be next year?

Two directions. Geographically — beyond Southeast Asia into Europe and globally, through hostel chains and country ambassadors (the Mad Monkey model, repeated). And in engagement — leaning into big real-world moments like World Cleanup Day to rally the community. A year from now, I want KrapMaps to be the app a backpacker instinctively opens in a new city, with a genuinely active global community behind the map.

9. Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.

Here's the honest bit: our "customers" aren't our users — the app is free and always will be. Our first revenue comes through partnerships: a signed travel-insurance affiliate (Genki), plus eSIM and booking affiliates our travellers already use. Over the next year we expect revenue from three places — brands sponsoring our community sustainability goals, those travel affiliates scaling with our user base, and early data-licensing pilots with councils and tourism boards. We're deliberately not building the business on charging people to do good; we monetise the value around them.

10. What’s your biggest threat?

Two, honestly. The obvious one: a giant like Google Maps could add bin data someday — but our defence is the thing they'll never build: the community, the game, the culture. Google will never make mapping bins fun, and an empty map is useless, so the data and community we've already built are the real moat. The quieter threat is the classic early-stage one — focus and runway. As a small team there are a hundred things we could do; the discipline to do only the few that matter, and to fund them, is the real fight.

This startup founder interview template is based on HackerNoon Founder & CEO David Smooke’s ten questions for startup founders.