NB: Tnooz launched TLabs in March 2010, a dedicated channel to give startups in the travel, tourism and hospitality sector an opportunity to explain their vision, company background and strategy to a wider audience.
As well as publishing an elevator pitch-type questionnaire for each business, Tnooz committed to following up with each startup after 12 months or so to see how well (or not) each performed.
GetYourGuide is a Switzerland-based tour and activity platform, first featured on Tnooz in March 2010 [TLabs Showcase - GetYourGuide].
Are you making money yet?
Yes. By virtue of running an e-commerce platform we started making money shortly after launching the customer-facing site.
What has been the biggest problem - building the product/service or marketing it to consumers/travel industry?
As with most two-sided e-commerce platforms, the product side tends to be easier to build in the short-term than the customer side, which has also been our experience. For inherently non-viral products, it simply takes longer for marketing and business development efforts to start showing results than for the product and sales teams to get products on board. In the long-run, however, you can’t have one without the other.
Biggest assumption in the business plan that was wrong?
There wasn’t any particular assumption that went blatantly wrong, but in retrospect you could say that we were a bit starry-eyed with some expectations about our first foray into the travel space.
Is your current customer base as predicted?
Yes.
Did you achieve your 12 month goals? If not, why not?
Yes. 12 months ago we set out to reach 5,000 products and come close to profitability. Both goals have been reached.
Has the problem you were trying to solve changed?
No. When we started GetYourGuide, there were two intertwined problems we set out to solve.
One was the lack of industry standards or protocols in the tours and activities industry, which particularly catered to the techy DNA of our founding team.
However, looking at the general history of business, standards have always been set by either a regulatory body or, more often, by companies or conglomerates with the largest market power.
The latter route is what we are trying to take by creating the largest digital repository of bookable tours and activities and building strong B2C and B2B distribution channels around it.
The other problem was the lack of a marketplace for customers to transparently compare and book local tours & activities around the world.
Growing up with open marketplaces like eBay and Amazon, we couldn’t think of any other way for e-commerce to work. It was for this reason that we often have to fight the fact that intransparency rather than transparency constitutes one of the core tenets in travel.
There are many sound historic reasons why travel developed this way, but we also think that the multi-billion dollar tours & activities sector is ready for modern e-commerce just like hotels and flights had to be ten to twenty years ago.
It will take time to solve these problems, but we like to think that the bigger the challenge, the more rewarding success will be.
Which startup that has launched in the past 12 months did you think "Ah, wish we had done that!"?
One of the things we learned from meeting and reading about successful entrepreneurs is that ideas themselves are worth little compared to the full array of other factors required for success.
In travel there have been a few start-ups that took interesting twists on existing ideas or implemented ideas for which the time was ripe, such as peer-to-peer room rentals, but none of them would have been impressive without their impressive execution, so it’s difficult for us to answer the question whether we would have performed similarly given the same initial business idea.
If you could go back in time and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?
Enjoy the ride.
GetYourGuide on Tnooz since March 2010:
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.