Symen Jansma is transitioning TravelBird, a vacation flash-deals promoter, from a start-up to a growth-stage company.
TravelBird e-mails users six inspirational deals each day in thematic categories like "Romantic getaways".
Founded five years ago, the company has grown fast. It now has more than 650 employees and it offers deals in 17 European countries. Last year it had more than $100 million in revenue.
In May, it had a Euro 16 million funding round, bringing its total fundraising to about $40.9 million.
In a recent Q&A with Tnooz, Jansma spoke from his company's headquarters in central Amsterdam. He explained why TravelBird has thrived despite the industry skepticism about the profitability of flash deals. He also shared how he manages to keep the company thriving and focused on its mission as it rapidly scales up in size.
Tnooz: Why has TravelBird succeeded, for readers whose only point of comparison may be Travelzoo, Jetsetter, or Groupon Getaways?
Jansma: We owe our success to a simple formula: we surprise and inspire customers with the best travel deals and we provides a no-hassle booking process. Customers say to themselves, "Hey, that vacation package -- that's a great idea!" So it's almost like the fashion industry model.
Tnooz: Okay. The conventional wisdom in the United States is that the daily deals has a limited growth because it is a ... It is counter-cyclical so that it does well during a recession or bad economic times, but it doesn't do well in good times. Now Groupon Getaways has been growing steadily, and Travelzoo, which is partly flash deals, has always done steadily okay. What is the case for daily deals?
Jansma: I think it's very important to execute well on this model. I think this is something... um, you don't want to be merely a distressed inventory channel for hotels. I think what is also important is to really understand the travelers in your markets at a granular level.
Tnooz: Can you just restate and elaborate what TravelBird does that makes it stand out from legacy travel companies?
Jansma: Yeah, first, one of our responsibilities is to really try to understand what travelers want. If we can do that, we can do better than competitors. We use a lot of data analytics for that.
Secondly of course, is the ability to source deals, and one of the advantages of us is we are a young flexible company so we see that something new pops up then we can really jump on it as inventory.
So for me I expect our teams to be very good in understanding what the market role in delivering is from the outside perspective. The goal is that a traveler, everyday, is delightfully, serendiptiously, and relevantly surprised by new offers.
Tnooz: What is new for TravelBird since the raise that happened with Global Founder's Capital and Rocket Internet?
Jansma: Well, a lot, I think. This investment, really helped us to grow and improve our quality. What we did with the investment is set up new countries. Now, we have a European scale. We can share offers amongst these countries, is one thing we did. Second thing we did ...
Tnooz: What does it that you mean when you have European scale and you can share offers among these countries?
Jansma: Well, for instance, we are active in 17 countries now. If you already are active in let's say, Italy, and you want to set up Denmark, a lot of people, a lot of Danish people, like to travel to Italy, they already have access to destinations, hotels, etcetera, in Italy, which can sell not only to the Italians, but to the Portuguese people, but also to the Danish people. With a European network, it's easier for you to share offers around the countries.
Tnooz: So if you are a TravelBird user, you get six deals a day by email newsletter. Is there anything that can be done to personalize the offers so that if I am Danish and I am interested in Italy, I will see offers from Italy, and not just ...
Jansma: What we do today ... The six day deals we have is one part of our program. The other part is the categories. We go to the UK landing base that you will see some categories for the other countries that you activate so we tried to do is be more relevant.
Tnooz: For example, sun holidays and clamping holidays in the UK? That's tailored based on what people from visiting the UK page tend to like?
Jansma: Yes. Soon you will see other categories, other offers than I do, for instance. This is not what we do today, but it's what we're working on.
Tnooz: Pardon me interrupting you. I think you were making a point about what else you've been doing with the investment. You now have European scale and you can ...
Jansma: Yes, so, the one thing that we wanted to do is have broader areas for offers. That's why we said okay, let's set up more countries then we could more easily share offers.
Second reason, was that we wanted to invest more in our product team. We extended our tech and product skills, of course. We're investing in the back-end, and we're working to improve the user experience.
Tnooz: I have a managerial question. How do you you make sure your vision is replicated and people are executing consistently in all of these different countries and as you grow up to about seven hundred employees?
Jansma: Three things: Being clear what the vision is, having a good company culture, and attracting great people.
We try to be very clear of what we expect from people. We use Objectives and Key Results (OKR), something many companies, like Google uses, to communicate our objectives. One is to make it very clear: what is our goal, what is our vision, what are we doing it for. We bring it to a personal level, so not only as a company, but also at the country and individual role level.
Two, is you pay a lot of attention to culture. I think culture is one big essence of your company, so we're explicitly clear in how we can work together, what we expect from you, how we do things, the working environment is very, the energy and passion of the people here.
The third is to hire great people. I think if the first two are in place, the third will follow. If you have exciting challenges then the great people will follow as well. With great people you can build on great plans as well.
Tnooz: Okay.
Jansma: When we look at the structure, what we try to do is work in self-organizing units. We call them cells. So every country has a country team, a country cell. The cells are grouped around the market. Cells let us be more flexible and entrepreneurial despite becoming a large organization. If every cell has the same goal, you don't always need all the rules because people work together each other, so I think that re helps execute.
Tnooz: Is there anything about how you sort of communicate to your top-level people, and how the top-level team communicates with each other, to make sure priorities are staying prioritized?
Jansma: Yeah, we have two cycles. One is a weekly cycle. Every Monday morning we have a leadership team meeting, about 30 of the company's top people come together where we share visions and identify quickly what the new decisions are.
It's where you present your plan to the rest of the group and so we always agree upon each other's plans. If you present a plan, then group says okay this is what we think we should do. They can challenge each other. We do this in a cycle of two weeks.
First you give you a dream of yours. If you have a dream then you try to make it more explicit, financially as well, and then you break it down into small pieces, and then you report the progress, and so this is really done in a group...
What we try to do is have some kind of peer pressure where we challenge each other. The team members report to each other, so it's not that they only report to me or to one of my team members, but give a progress report to the whole team.
Tnooz: Okay. You've said elsewhere that you would like to still be TravelBird CEO in 20 years.
Jansma: Yeah.
Tnooz: How big do you think TravelBird can get?
Jansma: Oh, it's so hard to say. That's a question I get so many times. We're only five years old now and if you would have asked me five years ago where TravelBird would stand today, no way I would tell you the same story. I really didn't have a clue. We didn't have a huge master plan or something to build a company like this in five years time.
Now we just had a dream and we saw that a lot people needing help to plan their next holiday, and then we thought okay let's make it simple and easy and make a great website and we were always quite ambitious but I never thought that it would become as big as it is today.
Tnooz: Understood.
Jansma: If you ask me now where we'll stand in 20 years. It's very hard. I hope it's still independent. I hope that a lot of people travel with us and see us as the main source for finding great holiday ideas.
Tnooz: What is the difference between TravelBird and Groupon Getaways?
Jansma: Well it's hard to say. Generally I don't like to talk about other companies. I like to stick to my own company, and what we try to do is A: inspire everyday with new travel offers that gives you a good reason to come back to our website. What we try to do is make it easier for your to choose a trip than other sites.
Thirdly, we want to inspire you and make every one of the trips you book through us unique. We try to be as good as possible.
Tnooz: Sure. Will TravelBird come to America?
Jansma: Maybe sometime (laughs). At least to the Phocuswright Conference.
Tnooz: (laughs). When HotelTonight was hiring people, CEO Sam Shank found that it was a mistake to try to hire from people from inside the travel industry. His team very quickly decided to try to start hiring people who didn't have any travel industry experience and preconceptions -- people who were fresh faces and had fresh approaches. What's been your experience?
Jansma: No, we have exactly the same experience. I don't want to trash the travel industry's legacy players, but yes, I think what you could say more in general is that if you want to change something in the travel industry, if you want to do it differently, you need a fresh approach. We brought a data-based approach, for one thing.
I think you can only innovate in any industry with people from outside of it. Tesla could innovate in cars because its team came from outside the legacy automotive players and their assumptions.
EARLIER: TravelBird flies high with big Euro 16.5 million raise to fuel growth
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