Iain Manley

Iain is the founder and CEO of VoiceMap, the leading platform for self-guided audio tours. The app has been installed by over a million travellers or curious locals, and its almost 1,000 publishers offer more than 2,000 tours across 600 destinations worldwide. They’ve earned over $1 million in royalties along the way.

Before launching the platform in 2014, Iain spent a decade living, working and travelling around the world – including an 18-month journey from London to Shanghai by land, which he documented at Old World Wandering. It was one of the first travel blogs, and a place where – in the words of an editor at National Geographic Traveler – “thoughtful, well-written slow travel writing with a strong sense of history and culture...can be reliably found.” His long-form dispatches were regularly featured by curators like The Browser, Longreads and Longform.org.

His favourite travel experiences almost always have one thing in common: someone shows him their corner of the world. They connect opinions, anecdotes and emotions to places, and use phrases like “I love”, “I remember” and “I hope” to describe things that might otherwise have been ordinary.

He likes to think that VoiceMap has become a place where these human perspectives can be reliably found.