In 2013, Hamed Al-Khabaz was kicked out of Montreal’s Dawson College after stumbling upon a giant security flaw in one of its major computer systems.
A couple of months later, in April 2013, he and a college friend began a startup aimed at consumers called Zilyo.
The business applies the metasearch model to vacation and peer-to-peer rentals, aggregating listings from Airbnb, HomeAway, and FlipKey.
Users can access listings via a browser-based tool and an iOS app.
The company says that 350,000 people have used its site so far, which, if true, is stunning in such a short time period.
They originally called their business Outpost Travel. But this month, they rebranded it Zilyo, after intensified pressures from a trademark owner.
Al-Khabaz's inspiration for starting the business came during his ample free time after having been expelled.
He was watching his parents try to book a cottage up in Mont Tremblant. He noticed they had more than 20 different tabs open on their screen and they were taking prices down on paper to compare them.
He told them to use some service like Kayak or Expedia, but those sites were only offering hotels, and his parents wanted to full experience of staying like a local.
After a quick search online Al-Khabaz couldn't find any appropriate tool for the job.
For example, Tripping.com is aggregating places to stay from the sharing economy offering online booking. (See Tnooz's coverage of Tripping.)
CompareAndShare.com has accommodations and rideshares. Roomlr.com also offers accommodations but they don’t focus on the sharing economy and offer hotels/hostels as well.
Hipmunk is another contender, whose hotel metasearch includes a check on Airbnb listings.
But in Al-Khabaz's view, none of these sites did the job comprehensively.
So he called his college friend Ovidiu Mija. Mija did his own research and arrived at the same conclusion: there was no tool doing the job of aggregating the sharing economy for travel properly.
So they decided to build it themselves.
In terms of amounts of data, Zilyo claims to have the biggest database of rentals, with nearly 2 million listings.
The company raised a small seed round of $200,000 in September 2013. They are now raising a post-seed round.
Zilyo has created a Vine to illustrate its premise.
Q&A with COO Ovidiu Mija:
Size of the team, names of founders, management roles and key personnel?
We are 4 full-time employees, all with a technical background. Hamed Al-Khabaz is the CEO and he’s our product guy and front-end developer.
Myself, Ovidiu Mija, I am the COO and I take care of the business side, partnerships, financing and day-to-day operations.
Trevor Starick is our CTO, and he’s involved in the back-end development and mobile. Dustin Blackman is our Lead Developer and he is fully on the back-end and database, doing his big data magic.
Estimation of market size?
In 2011, MIT Sloan estimated the Sharing Economy to have a market cap of $110B. Forbes is saying that the “Year to year growth [of the sharing economy] exceeds 25%”.
Competition?
There are some players already in the market. But we have the most comprehensive offering and the best growth marketing strategy.
Revenue model and strategy for profitability?
We are affiliated with the providers listed on our website and have deals with them to get paid every time an inquiry is sent or a transaction happens. The company is already profitable and is quickly growing using our growth strategy and customer acquisition ideas.
We focus on reaching into massive pools of targeted consumers and driving them to our product, as well as raising awareness about the awesomeness of the collaborative consumption.
What problem does the business solve?
The business solve the problem of discovering listings from the sharing economy (search), helps users compare them and ensures they get the best for their money, by aggregating all the available listings and serving them to the consumer using the same user experience.
How did the initial idea evolve and were there changes/any pivots along the way in the early stages?
The initial idea was to just put together all these listings on a map, kind of like Padmapper.com. It quickly evolved into an experience that has both a map view and a list view side by side giving the user full control over their browsing.
The three categories also formed early on. We started by finding users a place to stay, then we found them a way to get there and then we also found them something to do at their destination.
Why should people or companies use your business?
People should use our search engine if they are adopters of the sharing economy. Using Zilyo is like browsing all your favorite collaborative consumption website at once. We got rid of the hassle of manually searching and comparing all these websites and their listings manually.
Once they find what they were looking for, we let them book it right from the original provider.
What is the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition?
Growth hacking. We don’t have a marketing team but we’ve got smart developers who have skills in this department.
Additionally, we're partnering up with events to drive more people there by finding them affordable places to stay close to the event location as well as rideshares going there.
Where do you see the company in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
In 3 years I see our company as being ahead of the game in terms of data aggregation and competing directly with the traditional travel aggregators.
We will have to overcome a lot of technical challenges such as dealing with all the different data formats and data sets from all the providers. Fortunately, we’re well equipped for that and nothing stays in our way!
Additionally, we might have to fight with new government regulations against the collaborative consumption alongside our providers, and ensure a fair and open trade between our users.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
The sharing economy for travel is a booming industry that is currently unorganized with every player trying to take over the entire market.
We put them all together and offer an organized way to browse this market to the consumer, and try as much as possible to regularize it.
What other technology company would you consider yourselves most closely aligned to in terms of culture and style... and why?
I would say that the one company we would consider ourselves most closely aligned to in terms of culture and style is Airbnb. They are user focused, building their product with a perspective of design and user experience.
They disrupted the travel industry and gave the sharing economy a whole new approach. We’d like to think that one day we’ll make as big of an impact in our user’s lives.
Tnooz view:
It's always nice to see a team that's technical first. While most travel startups are led by marketers, Zilyo is run by engineers. They understand that the only thing that matters is growth.
But it may take marketing, not engineering, to drive much of that growth.
Consider how Pinterest used Meet-Ups and its Pin-it-forward program to grow.
True, the Zilyo engineers have some clever ideas about growth hacking that's worthy of growthhackers.com and Ryan Holiday's solid Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR.
Exhibit A: Here’s an article from one of them describing one of the ways we use social media to acquire users. "Twitter: an untapped well of potential new users: How I used natural language processing (NLP) to find users I would have never targeted before."
For more, see this Q&A with the CEO.
It's also nice that Zilyo has quickly become profitable, and that it is focused on pleasing users first.
Investors: shoot these guys an email!