STARTUP STAGE: Motourismo helps motorcyclists book trips worldwide

Motourismo

Motorismo raised €1 million in seed funding in July 2021 and will invest in expansion.

Motourismo is a search and booking platform for motorcycle trips and helps riders ship their motorcycles where required.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Motourismo is the first marketplace for motorcycle tourism. We digitize a highly fragmented market and provide a one-stop solution for both customers and suppliers. For the first time, motorcyclists can easily find, compare and book worldwide motorcycle trips.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

The market for motorcycle tourism is not a niche but, with more than 170 million motorcyclists in western economies, a specific mass market. 

The average booking volume for a tour is a considerable four-digit amount. We provide both supply and demand side with an easy-to-use platform that will evolve strongly over the next 12 months. 

In terms of technology, the beauty of our model is there is no new wheel to be invented in this segment, but rather existing solutions to be adapted as well as combined with special market segment expertize.

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

What we can give you is an SO analysis. Our strengths lie in the combination of all the know-how needed to run a company like our’s in our market successfully: industry know-how and network, technological capabilities and marketing mastery. 

Also, our strategic partners and the industry contacts that we have made over the years, like Louis, ADVrider.com and REV’IT!, provide for a solid ground. 

The opportunities are numerous, both in activating more and more demand in existing markets like Europe and North America, but also addressing new geographic target groups as in India and China. 

The only weakness might be seen in possibly stronger arising sustainability and environment regulations for climate change reasons, however, electric powertrain technology is also already developing in the motorcycle industry, and in fact, we welcome moving along with this transition effortlessly.

As a threat we don’t see any more than what is a threat to the tourism industry in general during these times: pandemics.

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

Motourismo brings together the demand and supply side and provides both with what they were missing: customers find suitable offers in one place and operators get visibility and market accessibility, making it easy for both sides to do business. 

By doing this, Motourismo brings efficiency to the market for the first time.

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

The market for motorcycle tours, training and shipping already existed before Motourismo was launched. 

However, by giving both sides, supply and demand, a focal point through our platform, we quite naturally draw a lot of volume to our site. 

We attract that via paid and organic search, via email and more and more via social media channels. 

In a later stage, after satisfying all existing demand, we will also develop our marketing approach further by being the only player in the market doing professional, highly emotional and continuous content marketing. 

In addition, our exclusive and broad market insights will enable us to address more users to create additional demand for our offerings.

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

Our founder Michael Carlin experienced the users’ need for our company first hand when he wanted to go on a tour in winter and didn’t find the right offer, but spent days searching for it. The concept of Motourismo, known in other industries already, was simply missing in the motorcycle market. 

We value the whole market at €100 billion market volume in 2030 as both basket values and the number of motorcyclists are very high.

How and when will you make money?

We are already making a positive return on ad spend for each booking that takes place on Motourismo. Our business model is commission based as of today.

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

We are first time founders, and all the more happy that we were able to establish a convincing product and win thousands of customers already.

The backgrounds of the founding team are in journalism and content as well as product management (Michael), marketing and finances (Christoph) and tech (Malte).

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

Next to the fundraising itself, it’s managing the limited resources you have as a young startup and still achieving the goals you’ve set for yourself. This involves a continuous and sometimes painful prioritization and learning process.

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

While we are the first platform of our kind on our market, we didn’t invent the market itself – that has existed for a long time already, and now it will not only continue to exist, but be developed further through our work. 

Motorcyclists are super passionate about riding, and this is something that just won’t go away.

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

We will be fully internationalized, have grown by a significant factor and will have laid the foundation for a quantum leap in our technical setup.

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

Our mission is to enable our customers to enjoy their passion by riding the world – with the right offer, at the right price, time and place.

For the next years, we are striving to do that more and more, better and better – regardless of whether we do that as a profitable private company or as a part of a larger organization that pursues similar goals as we do.