Recently my company Travelatus joined tours and activities marketplace Excursiopedia and became part of a small company that’s got the potential to grow huge.
NB: This is a viewpoint from Valentin Dombrovsky, vice president of innovations, Excursiopedia.
There are different points of view regarding entrepreneurs and startups behavior – some say you should “fail fast” and that position is populated by “lean startup” methodology.
Others say you need to have grit and fight until “the last pivot”.
These approaches are not so conflicting but I never understood the “fail fast” concept (even after Paul Graham tried to explain it to me) and always thought that grit is one of the most important things to be successful.
So what happened? Should I say that selling a company after six months in existence is too early and wasn’t the exit too fast? I’ll try to explain our motivation.
Getting away from part time work regime
Travelatus started in 2011 with its founders working on it part time and making money via consulting (thus following Paul Graham’s covenants). That was until we got into StartupYard accelerator in Prague which allowed us to perform shock work for three months, develop more than we managed to do for the preceding 18 months and launch the project.
Then, we started working part time again trying to find investment for the project. Unfortunately, the accelerator didn’t manage to help us in this as it was connected primarily with Czech investors who may have found our project too risky.
It seems to me that European investors are quite similar to Russian in this respect, trying to fund startups with “proven business models” – not the ones that try to experiment in search of new market opportunities.
Combining work on clients’ projects with working on your own project is not the worst variant but it’s not very good for the company.
We were not able to get sales and show any traction from the beginning – we had to find some ideas on how we could get some results using a small amount of resources. We had ideas but didn’t have time for their realization and getting investments for experiments didn’t seem to be possible in a short period of time.
So the Excursiopedia offer gave us the opportunity to concentrate on realizing our ideas in online travel with enough resources.
Billion is better than million
We all know this phrase – even those who haven't ever seen a million dollars. We want to build something global and money is not the only reason for it.
We could have tried to grow Travelatus into a global company; however, even if we had succeeded it would have taken too much time. Joining up with Excursiopedia allowed us to “race past” a few steps on the way to the desired billion and to use the skills we have on the way.
It would have been an interesting experience to grow a company of three to a company of at least 20 people (the size of Excursiopedia team currently), but finding a viable business model and raising investments to continue working in a highly competitive market was way too hard a task for us.
When we received congratulations on “making an exit”, it felt more like “an entry” and great things are yet to come.
Opportunity to use the skills we have
The startup's CEO is the one who is responsible for everything that happens in the company. To be honest, there were some tasks that I would have delegated gladly. At the same time my co-founders – Denis and Vitaliy – can do more than simply coding and they didn’t get use all their skills either.
I also managed to gain some reputation and connections in the online travel community both in Russia and abroad. I felt that my broad network would be a useful resource for the future – while we were working as a small team this network's potential wasn’t fully used.
One of my responsibilities in Excursiopedia in a new role of VP Innovations is working with partners (one of the main priorities for the company) so I’m glad I have an opportunity to use the resources that I gathered while I was working in the online travel market.
In general I’m still “responsible for everything” but on a higher level that is closer to solving strategic questions (which might sound like a paradox when I started working as a company employee after being CEO of my own company).
My partners are also making “a step up” and will take positions giving them the opportunity to work to their full potential.
Working on the big market with a big team
Even those who liked the idea of our event travel solution said we had little chance to succeed in online travel without huge investment and a team of more than three people.
There are many niches with lots of potential in online travel market but it’s very competitive and requires either disruptive ideas or lots of resources – it’s really hard to work on it with a small team.
Common vision on service development
The Excursiopedia offer wasn’t the first one but it was the first which didn’t include the condition to drop our own service development and to join the new team. Travelatus will continue working and we will do our best to make it a better being kind of an example of an Excursiopedia affiliate partner.
In general, we’re building a service based on the concept of smart travel – travel that has some goal. Seeing a concert or sporting event are examples. But, it can be a travel that is filled with experiences of any kind that might be presented on Excursiopedia, so we continue moving in the same direction.
Excursiopedia will add event tickets on its platform and our task is to help it with that. We’re building a platform for everything that can be done during travel and not only in travel – sometimes there’s a need to find something interesting to do in your hometown, isn’t there?
Moving to Munich
Excursiopedia's main office is based in Europe and for our team it is an opportunity to live and to work in the center of Europe. I can’t say it was the most important factor but it was hard to refuse it. As I’ve written already, three months in Prague was very good for us in terms of effectiveness – we hope to be that effective this time too.
Lessons learned
What lessons did we learn while building a travel startup? Well, some of them are similar to Diego Saez-Gill’s lessons. Still I’ll name a few:
- Don’t try to build a solution for everyone from scratch. We tried to build an event travel solution without focusing on specific topic or geography – this didn’t work.
- Think of the most effective ways to find at least a few early adopters who can bring you really valuable feedback about your product.
- You’ll have to work hard to break people’s habits. And people always have certain ways to do daily tasks – disruption is not an easy thing.
- Be ready to fail and to pivot. You should be doing things really fast in order to keep your project alive.
- Your professional network is a vital part of the business. My connections helped us go forward instead of the failure that could have happened because of all the mistakes we made.
In conclusion I want to say once again that the deal with Excursiopedia is not the end of Travelatus but one more stage in the life of our project. This time it continues as part of a bigger company that we hope to make one of the most famous in online travel.
NB: This is a viewpoint from Valentin Dombrovsky, vice president of innovations, Excursiopedia.
NB2: Building blocks image via Shutterstock.