TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring France-based trip management and planning platform Wipolo.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
My name is Matthieu Heslouin. I am co-founder and CEO of Wipolo. I am 40 years old, graduated from ESSEC business school in 1995 and worked 12 years in the IT industry for large US companies before starting Wipolo. I am passionate about business and technology and, of course, travel.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
Wipolo is a self-financed company. Founders invested Euro 900,000 in the project.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Connecting my travels in one place regardless of where I booked. Avoid having my travel life split by emails, trip books and photo albums.
Describe the business, core products and services?
Wipolo is a web and mobile platform (iPhone, Android, WP7, BB, Bada). Travellers create their Wipolo with a valid email address or through a Facebook connect and they may centralize all their trips details.
Wipolo is easy of use since you just need to forward your booking confirmation emails to upload them on the platform.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
Frequent travellers because we learned a lot from them in terms of the trip structure. It also helped us to design the trip management system and, then, we could create the social layer.
We believe this is the best way.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
We observed our friends and families.
First of all, they had trouble managing their upcoming trip details (especially printed documents and emails) and keeping track of their past trips.
Secondly, they all were sharing their trip history and plans or passport contents when they meet with friends during dinners or casual discussions.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
Wipolo is absolutely free. Business model is to provide the best-personalized travel and local deals to users based on the travel profile.
Business users may subscribe to Wipolo pro service to receive notifications and alerts on their mobile before and during their trips.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- Strong technical team
- Advisory board with travel and social network experience
- Technical platform
- Starting the service in Europe because of travel complexity (especially for trains and hotels)
Weaknesses:
- Building a tech platform is cash consuming
Opportunities:
- Facebook growth
- Partnerships with large travel companies who want to optimize cross-selling
- Growth of mobile usage in travel
Threats:
- Complexity of platform versus keeping the service very simple for the user
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?First VC we met, because it is difficult for them to think we can do cross selling while we are positioned as a post booking service.
We believe that what’s the most important is building the traveller profile, ensuring there will be opportunities to integrate local deals. For instance: If Wipolo knows your flight, we may propose a hotel, or if Wipolo knows your favourite destination we will offer general and relevant deals.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
We have a 20x ratio on the number of web visitors without any marketing. And now that we have a full Facebook integration (last two week) we expect to exceed it in 2012.
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.