STARTUP STAGE: Tashi provides technology for travel marketplaces

Tashi

Tashi provides the drag-and-drop tools, integrations and templates to easily create and launch a peer-to-peer travel marketplace.

Launched in 2020, Tashi says it currently powers five marketplaces and aims to have 20 by the end of 2022.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

With Tashi's no-code software platform for travel marketplaces, you can create, configure and launch your own Airbnb style peer-to-peer marketplace for 1% of the time and cost of a custom-built solution. We're powering a growing army of travel marketplaces that are becoming a counterpoint to the global players like Airbnb, Booking, Ctrip and Expedia.

We launched in 2020, and we're already powering five live marketplaces, with another five due to launch by late-2021. Booking.com picked us as one of the Top 10 Sustainable Travel startups globally. Our customers already include the International Development Bank and large travel groups in the United States, Australia, India and South Africa.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

We’re taking the tech out of launching a new marketplace for the people building the next Airbnb. Our platform has on one side the enterprise-grade back-office tools and integrations you’ll need if you want to scale millions of suppliers and guests with a drag and drop front end builder so that you can customize your features and the look and feel. We’ve got the back-office integrations like payment gateways, channel managers and online travel agent connections that you need. Our advanced supplier booking system can also cater to the vast array of product requirements for accommodation, multi-day and day tours, and activity providers. And on the front end, our pre-built templates and drag and drop content management system make it simple for our customers to configure their marketplace to their requirements and launch in a lean and quick way.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

• Strengths: We have an unbeatable combination of technology expertise and domain experience. Mac Gaughan (co-founder) previously founded his own travel marketplace and learned the do’s and don’t’s on how to do it, and Tom Schäuble (co-founder) has built platforms that have processed billions of dollars in revenue.
• Weaknesses: Capital. COVID has hampered our initial capital raising, so we focused on building our platform and steadily growing our user base to build a strong investment case for when travel volumes resume.
• Opportunities: Every travel marketplace needs the exact same features and functionality to help guests book and suppliers onboard themselves. We’ve built an advanced platform and a suite of Apps to let our customers mix and match the marketplaces features to suit their needs.
• Threats: Naturally, the largest OTAs are the biggest threat to our customers and thereby us. While they continue to grow, they continue to stifle innovation and consolidate resources in the hands of fewer and fewer people. We’re going to change that.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

It's always been too expensive, and it's taken too much time to launch a new travel marketplace. This barrier to entry has stifled competition and restricted the options available to customers. New travel marketplaces have the choice of starting a poor cheap MVP on WordPress that breaks as soon as you start to grow or an expensive $100,000+ custom-built platform that takes six-plus months and that cost startups critical time and money when they want to launch. 

These poor or expensive options have always proved a barrier to those looking to launch new travel marketplaces, and they've been on the back foot since day one. We've got the back-office integrations like payment gateways, channel managers and online travel agent (OTA) connections that you need. Our advanced supplier booking system can also cater to the vast array of product requirements for accommodation, tour, and activity providers. On the front end, our pre-built templates and drag and drop content management system makes it simple for our customers to configure their marketplace to their requirements and launch in a lean and quick way.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

We've already gotten a lot of inbound interest from travel entrepreneurs, destination management organizations (DMOs) and existing travel marketplaces that want to upgrade their platform. We've signed on ten marketplaces with five live already, and they have over 2,000 vendors - accommodation providers and tours and activity operators set up and selling.

As the leading provider of a peer-to-peer travel marketplace software, we've already ranked number one on Google for related search terms. We've grown from inbound sales to date through brand development, travel industry partnerships and investment in search engine optimization around targeted keywords.

As we grow our community of travel marketplaces, from five live now to 20 by the end of 2022 and 100 by 2025, we'll steadily grow our SEO footprint and domain authority.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market?

I (Mac) founded a travel marketplace three years ago called Clean Travel. Cleantravel.org became the home for the best sustainable travel experiences on the planet. But when I started, I was full of energy, optimistic and naturally naïve! Building the marketplace tech was a huge pain. I launched on WordPress and engaged a team of poorly paid, barely interested developers in Vietnam via UpWork. I spent hours learning how to navigate WP and its plug-ins so that I could tell my team exactly what they needed to do. I had to figure out what I wanted to do, learn how it could be done and then describe, in exact detail, to the developers what I wanted. It was an exhausting and expensive lesson to learn. But it's a familiar story we hear from countless travel entrepreneurs that have approached us to learn more about our no-code platform for travel marketplaces. They're excited about what they're building and eager to launch with Tashi because we've removed the tech barrier to launching a travel marketplace.

The market opportunity, despite COVID-19, is huge. The total addressable market (TAM) for accommodation and tours globally is $3.4 trillion, with the serviceable address market (SAM) at $1.5 trillion. These figures came from Airbnb's S-1 filing prior to their IPO in December 2020.

How and when will you make money?

You can launch with the base version of our travel marketplace platform for a reasonable deployment fee and then purchase apps to increase its functionality. We then have a monthly fee that only rises in line with our customer's success.

Example apps include: guest “manage by booking” portal; peer-to-peer messaging; channel management integrations; accounting system integrations; gift card management. That means our customers are launch lean and that our revenue grows directly in line with our customers’ success.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Tashi is our life's work. I (Mac) started a Himalayan-focused trekking company 10 years ago during a three-year stint in Nepal. I went on to found a travel marketplace three years ago called Clean Travel. Cleantravel.org became the home for the best sustainable travel experiences on the planet. It also taught me a mountain of invaluable lessons along the way. When I teamed up with Tom a few years ago, we set out to solve this problem. Tom has worked as a developer for over 20 years. He's built eCommerce sites that have processed over $100 million and a trade contract system with over $1.4 billion worth of deals under management. In 2015 he founded his first startup, RoomRanger, a hotel management system while living in Peru. Together, we've come to solve a huge problem for travel entrepreneurs, and we've never been more excited about what the future holds.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

As a migrant to Australia, I’m acutely aware of the biases that can exist below the surface in a work environment. We’re an equal opportunities employer and in the process of becoming a B Corp, so making our work environment welcoming to people from all backgrounds is paramount to our mission as a business.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

COVID has been a huge challenge for obvious reasons. We launched in March 2020 – literally JUST as COVID was gathering pace! Talk about timing! But we’re optimistic that having weather this storm, we’re ready to rebuild travel, one marketplace at a time. We’ve never been more excited about where we see the industry is going. Five years from now, Tashi growing army of niche travel marketplace surge will be taking on the behemoths of the travel industry and winning!

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact – so why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?

Our early traction and inbound interest to date tell us that we've hit a huge pain point for travel entrepreneurs and businesses. Across the board, the no-code movement is knocking down the tech barrier and leading to the growth of the creator economy within ECommerce, music, video and news. The next generation of entrepreneurs, the people that will build the next Airbnb, won't be coders. We're the no code marketplace solution for the travel industry and already the global leaders in this exciting emerging space. 

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

A year from now, we'll be powering 20 travel marketplaces, which are doing $100 million in bookings per year. We'll be two years into our 5-year plan to be powering 100 travel marketplaces doing $1 billion in bookings per year by 2025.

What is your end-game? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

We’re building an army of travel marketplaces that will act as a genuine counterpoint to the current global players like Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb and C-Trip. We’ll continue building and growing until we achieve that.