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Scotland-based startup Make It Social has created an integrated button to facilitate group bookings for tour operators.
The concept is simple: tour operators add the "Book It Socially" button, which allows potential guests to create a group, invite friends and share the cost of the tour/activity seamlessly. The company provides a dashboard for operators to see the status of these group bookings alongside other useful information such as conversion rates and fall-offs in the check out process.
The team has made an excellent effort to explain the product below, so we'll leave it with them to share more - including the Vine and screenshots of the backend dashboard product for operators that promises easier management of groups.
Tell us how you founded the company, why and what made you decide to jump in and create the business.
We founded Make it Social simply to make life easier for groups of friends to book things.
Our founder, Eddie Robb, was constantly frustrated with the difficulties of trying to get his group of friends together to do anything. The main issues being, having one place to communicate with everyone, deciding on what to do, deciding on when to do it and ultimately, deciding who was going to take the reins and pay up for the group. A keen traveller, Eddie was often the guy who was left with planning everything and is still chasing some friends for payment today!
We thought, “with the way the world is currently so ‘connected’ in the virtual world, there must be an easier way to organise doing something together in the real world”. And so the idea of Make it Social was born and we set about building an exciting and innovative business.
We quickly realised the huge potential value for the travel industry of being able to turn the groups that get stuck at the “hey guys… shall we do this?” stage into bookings and are working hard to deliver it to our clients.
What is the size of the team, names of founders, management roles and key personnel?
We’re a small yet very passionate team of 8 with our key driver being “to make the world a truly social place.”
Founder and Managing Director Eddie Robb who has had previous experience in start-up development through to exit, with travel company As You Like It Events Limited. Eddie’s strengths lie in innovation, development projects, and the corporate face of the brand and partnership development.
Paul Lettice - former Head of Trade Communications at Procter and Gamble covering a 25 year career. His experience of major brand development and his knowledge of senior level sales negotiation is proving invaluable.
Ted Wen, an experienced senior Python developer with significant experience in both public and private sector.
David Lazar is responsible for user experience and design.
Rob Leigh-Bramwell, with a background in real estate and also product development. We’ve just added three interns for the summer who will be working with us as things get busier and busier.
Please describe your funding arrangements.
We started off bootstrapping with seed funding from family and friends. This money has been stretched further by fantastic support from the Scottish Government and Princes Trust having been elected as one of Scotland’s High Growth Pipeline companies. We are currently progressing strongly with our first major round of investment (target raise of £500k) where we aim to bring in some key investors to help drive the business forward on a global scale
What is your estimation of market size?
The online leisure travel market worldwide is worth $237billion (2012 stats). With 70% of people considering a social recommendation to be important in their decision making process for the booking of trips (Google research, 2013) Make it Social target market is huge.
Recent in-house research (to be published shortly) suggests that there is also a vast amount of “Shall We?” ideas that don’t ever reach the ”Let’s Book It!“ stage because of a whole host of reasons around the difficulty of organisation. It’s therefore hard to calculate the exact market size for Make it Social within the travel industry.
However, with a solution aimed at making life easier for group bookings, plus the harnessing of social peer-to-peer introductions, we face a great opportunity to gain not only a good share of the existent leisure travel market, but to also capture a new previously untapped market by turning those potential customers that get stuck at the “Shall We?” stage into confirmed bookings.
Our primary age group is 16-30 active social media users, however, we will have a global reach, are notgender-specific and open to all ages. If someone likes to spend time with their friends, they will be able to use Make it Social to enhance their lives and book together hassle-free.
What is your competition?
There are a number of businesses who have attempted to solve part of the pain point of gathering a group of friends to take part in a trip or experience, but none of these competitors look at the problem in its entirety or in the way we do. ‘Group Money Collection’ companies such as Payumi and WePay simply gather and redirect users’ funds from a central pot.
There are companies such as GroupIze and Flights With Friends that help users share and book products presented through their own sites rather than the operator’s or agent’s. And finally there are the usual social networks with group gathering features such as Facebook events and Google Circles.
Our differentiator is that we provide the full spectrum of social buying from the point of discovery of a product to being completely booked without ever having to leave the providers website. Our system is tied in with the existing booking engines and reservations systems of our clients. All funds go straight from the customer to the experience provider. We let users invite their friends from multiple channels (LinkedIn, Facebook & Email) and we solve all the challenges and hassles associated with a group booking (voting on dates, discussing ideas, having questions answered etc).
Overall, for our clients, we harness the huge power of peer to peer marketing, and for our users we make having an active social life much easier.
Please explain your revenue model and strategy for profitability?
We try to be as transparent as possible with our pricing strategy. We have two products:
Make it Social Lite: Smaller companies or even individuals can run their tours, events etc from a simplified set of Make it Social features and their own Make it Social client webpage. This is fantastic for people with great business ideas to get up and running with full social booking functionality included. For this we take 5% capped at £1 per booking. With MiS Lite we aim to inspire and allow people with spare skills, ideas, space or time to provide a service and possibly test the market before moving on to Make it Social Pro.
Make it Social Pro: This is the complete integration of Make it Social to booking engines and payment gateways and also the inclusion of Make it Social’s ‘Book Socially’ button on the client’s existent website. For this we charge an initial setup fee followed by a commission on every sale made through the technology.
What problem does the business solve?
For companies, we solve the problems associated with group bookings…
- Communicating through one person to the rest of the group
- Gathering information on all group members
- Upselling to the entire group
- Taking payment from all members of the group
Companies should, in theory, love groups as they take advantage of economies of scale and fill up their spaces. However, in reality, they are incredibly difficult to manage and sometimes not worth the hassle of organising. Make it Social makes sales to groups incredibly simple, freeing up reservation managers’ time.
We’ve found that the amount of successful sales to groups by companies using our technology increases dramatically (and don’t get us started on what happens to the size of the group!)
For customers, we solve the hassles of booking things with friends…
- Where are we going?
- When are we going to do this?
- Who’s coming?
- Who’s going to pay for it all?
These are all pain points we face every time we try and arrange to do anything with friends. From going out for dinner or going on a 2 week holiday, group organisation is a challenge and Make it Social solves this.
How did the initial idea evolve and were there changes/any pivots along the way in the early stages?
Eddie’s initial idea was to create a travel agency aimed entirely at making life easier for groups of young people to get away together. As such, Make it Social was a key feature in the design of the ‘As You Like It Holidays’ website.
It quite quickly became apparent, however, that the ‘social booking’ functionality had a life of its own which was much larger than just youth travel. When we realised just how many industries face the same issues when dealing with group bookings, we had to pivot and established Make it Social as a stand-alone business.
The pure nature of groups, whilst being fascinating to us, is not without its challenges. Each group and also product is different and so the Make it Social technology has had to be flexible. As such, we’ve made a number of tweaks to our platform over the past year, however, the main focus has always been the same… to make group booking simple.
Why should people or companies use your business?
We provide companies with:
- Larger groups through peer-to-peer sales;
- More groups through simplicity of booking and the freeing up of sales agents’ time;
- Increased social interaction;
- A vast amount of customer data through each individual being involved in the booking process rather than just the group leader.
Companies add our technology to their site to increase revenues from social bookings.
For customers, we provide a complete and hassle free way of booking with friends. People who want to be more social, and we mean “real world social” not “online social”, use our technology to do so.
What is the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition (apart from PR)?
We are working a 3 pillar strategy of growth of Client base, Technology Development and a User experience programme. The User experience programme is actively managed by Rob working with, schools, colleges and universities. We’ve also got some really exciting brand development events with big worldwide brand partners lined up. We’ll let you guys know all the details soon.
With regards to client base strategy we’re active in the wider travel industry and attend most industry events. We’re an ”Innovator” at this year’s European PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit and will be at the World Travel Market 2014.
An exciting avenue for gaining new clients for our technology is via booking engine partners. So far we’ve integrated with TourCMS and Rezgo which means their clients can enjoy our technology without any setup fees. We plan to partner with more and are working on a several further key booking engine integrations.
Of course, we have a strong inbound marketing strategy and have developed our technology as a complete contactless SaaS system (i.e. clients should be able to sign themselves up and get going with social bookings in a matter of minutes!) however, we do still like to answer any questions and get to know our clients’ businesses so welcome direct contact.
Where do you see the company in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
In three years’ time we aim to have completely transformed the way social groups book online. We want Make it Social to be the go-to solution for travel industry group bookings and for the software to have a presence in all parts of the industry. Finally we also want Make it Social Lite to be a highly valuable tool for budding travel and tour entrepreneurs with start-up operations of their own.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another start-up to help it out?
Simply put, the travel, tourism and hospitality industry deals with group bookings in an antiquated way. ‘Payment in full’, separate ‘Group’ pages/departments and one point of communication between group and company mean that booking as a group is a hard process.
An organsied group (such as a stag trip or a sports tour) will have an allocated ‘Group Leader’ that will take the time to deal with this tedious process. With the current process we certainly aren’t making our customer or our group’s department’s lives any easier. There’s also a massive chunk of the market that are less organised groups. At Make it Social we call these group of friends (school leavers, old uni friends etc) ‘Social Bookers’. They are everywhere yet they’ve been left to fend for themselves. They have no group leader, they communicate as a group online and they tend to book as individuals (if they get as far as booking that is).
Making both group types life easier and accommodating for them will provide travel companies around the world with enhanced revenue streams and new customers.
Our own research showed us that 82% of people have been in discussions in the past year about doing a trip with friends that ultimately failed purely because of the complications involved in organising it. With untapped market potential like this, the travel industry certainly needs us!
What other technology company would you consider yourselves most closely aligned to in terms of culture and style... and why?
We’ve recently spent some time in the USA and have been lucky enough to get some first-hand exposure and a real understanding of how tech companies are run over there. A
trade mission to San Francisco saw us visit the likes of Google and LinkedIn and whilst in New York we spent time with our contacts at Mashable. With this grounding, we’ve adopted practices that mimic those we appreciated such asGoogle’s“20% projects” and, more recently, Facebook with their brand new ‘Creative Labs’. Innovation, reliability and fun are at the core of our business and we are developing our own culture.
Tnooz view:
Make It Social clearly addresses a pain point, as evidenced by the growing ranks of travel startups playing in the group booking space. The ability to add a button to a site to allow group bookings is clever - but also points to the underlying challenge of creating a defensible advantage to the strategy. Any of the other group booking providers could mimic this strategy, which shifts the conversation from distribution to experience - and the company that provides the best interface wins.
Tour operators are also short on time, so the startup that most clearly offers a marketing advantage, and actually helps drive group bookings outside of the tour operator's efforts, will also be more advantageously positioned to win in this market.
Another issue is the fact that other startups have already made in-roads, so Make It Social will have to double down on sales efforts to ensure they get a fair shake from operators.
NB: Social key image courtesy Shutterstock.