A travel gear site lost 60% of traffic during the pandemic. Here’s how the company recovered

In May 2015, Tom Wahlin was a New York City-based design manager for Apple. The pay was great. The benefits were great. The team was great. But he was feeling burned out.

“I put in my notice and planned to travel the world for a year or two to figure out what was next,” he said.

As he prepared for his trip, he ordered 10 of every travel product — everything from backpacks to packing cubes to toiletry bags. He tested each, settled on his favorites, sold the rest and boarded his flight.

While traveling, Wahlin published an article on Medium: Everything You Need to Travel the World in One Backpack. “This post went a little viral, and I knew I had something,” he said.

In January 2017, Wahlin launched Pack Hacker as a definitive online guide to travel gear. He’d spend the next seven years heads-down building Pack Hacker — then a buyer reached out.

Pack Hacker takes off, lands 7 figures in revenue

Wahlin, a designer and developer, was eager to build Pack Hacker’s website and perfect its logo and branding. He focused on every pixel — literally.

“Before I launched the site, I tried to make the design/development perfect,” he said. “My friends would email me saying this was a pixel off, or this was the wrong color. Good design gave us a lot of legitimacy in the early days, but I quickly realized content mattered most.”

His passion for travel gear fueled 12-hour workdays, which included weekends. “It was easy because I was so excited about it,” he told Memberful. “It felt natural; I felt inspired.”

The Pack Hacker website grew to feature packing lists, travel guides, gear reviews and more. Readers could find everything from an Earth-friendly sustainable packing list to the best travel sling bag to the 14 best water bottles for every trip. Each month, the site lands more than 4.5 million unique visitors, according to Pack Hacker’s media kit as of March 2024, four months post-sale.

Pack Hacker had two YouTube channels: Pack Hacker Main Channel and Pack Hacker Reviews. On both, viewers could consume a wide-range of travel content — from the ultimate packing cubes guide to a series on Merino wool travel clothing. Together, the two channels have 368,000+ subscribers and 1.6 million monthly views. Videos average 50,000 views, per the media kit.

Pack Hacker made money through affiliate marketing, meaning when readers clicked on a product link, Pack Hacker made a small commission. It also made money through brand partnerships, offering sponsored content including videos, articles and more.

Pack Hacker also offered a Pack Hacker Pro membership, which cost $60 a year and included entry to the Pro Community, exclusive content, ad-free browsing and access to a deals vault.

The membership launched in June 2020 after months of planning. But travel had halted due to the pandemic, and Pack Hacker took a hit. The site’s traffic, clicks and conversions dropped 60% within two weeks in March 2020, Wahlin shared, and he was forced to reduce the team’s hours.

The paid membership — with about 100 initial sign-ups — helped get the site through, he shared. He also noted that a portion of the audience reads or watches Pack Hacker content for entertainment, which helped.

Over the next year, the team adjusted its content strategy and wrote about remote work strategies, staycations and even work-from-home gear.

“We pivoted enough of our content over the next year that we were able to repair the damage and even out revenue about a year later,” Wahlin said.

Despite the ups and downs, Pack Hacker remained completely bootstrapped. At sale in 2023, the team consisted of five employees, who worked from Detroit, and six contractors. Revenue was 7 figures, Wahlin shared.

“The strategic fit was so strong:” Details of Pack Hackers’ sale

Selling Pack Hacker had crossed Wahlin’s mind, but he wasn’t serious about it — until an interested buyer approached and “the strategic fit was so strong that I thought it would be silly to not have a conversation,” he said.

That interested buyer was AllGear Digital, which owns a network of media sites focused on the outdoors and active lifestyles. AllGear Digital has acquired a number of media properties in recent years, including Soap Hub and BikeRumor.

Bill Tucker, a close family-friend who has extensive experience selling companies, served as Wahlin’s “pseudo-broker.” He also leaned on They Got Acquired’s resources.

“I’ve read on TGA that it’s a lot of effort for founders to sell,” Wahlin said. “I had the day-to-day very well delegated so I wasn’t as concerned, but wow, I was wrong. There’s a lot of work to do during acquisition.”

Just one example: He had to list out the hundreds of software packages and plugins Pack Hacker used in its development stack. The process required an entire weekend — and a lot of good coffee.

Due diligence proved the most challenging part of the deal. “The Quality of Earnings team dug into everything, including transactions from three years ago,” he said. “They really turn over every stone to ensure they catch any issues or errors.”

Simply waiting was also difficult. The parties were trying to close the week before Thanksgiving, which can be an especially busy time for media companies.

“The deal kept getting pushed back week by week until I didn’t think it was going to happen and almost wrote it off,” Wahlin said. “The only thing to do at that point is patiently wait and hope that the deal goes through while continuing to run and operate your business hard to ensure the metrics stay at a reasonable level for acquisition.”

Finally, the purchase agreement was signed, and in December 2023, Pack Hacker officially became part of AllGear Digital.

The sale price was not disclosed, but there is an earnout component, so Wahlin will continue to work with AllGear Digital as Pack Hacker’s general manager “for the foreseeable future.”

“I’m thankful for the period of the earnout because I think it’ll provide a nice transition into the next thing I want to do — whether it’s to contribute my more specialized skill sets of design, brand building, and operations optimization to AllGear Digital, finding a job elsewhere, or starting something new,” he said.