All right. Good to see you again, Yiannis. Welcome to Bits and Bretzels.
Great to have you here. We um know each other for quite some time.
Yes. Just went back in my timeline, 16 years at this point. You were doing Amando at the time. I was just getting started with Get Your Guide. I was very much looking up to you.
Had so much success.
I still remember when you came by our Amyando office and we did this inventative thing and you did this marketplace in the very early innings about board games of experiences and I was very skeptical to be honest. I was like okay will this ever work? Is this like too fragmented? But he pulled it off. Now Get Your Guide is one of the big breakout winners here in Germany. And I'm not sure if you were in the audience this morning. We made a prediction that stratees might IPO next year.
Okay, I can't comment on that obviously, but what I can say is Felix is definitely one of not only the inspiring figures for me, but also one of the people who really gave me a lot of advice early on and you might not remember when I was at your office, we were still doing this platform mostly for student tour guides. I remember and then that completely failed and we had to pivot the entire business to the professional experiences market and you were a really great sparring partner throughout and later also invested. So thank you very much.
Thanks, thanks. Let's focus on the entrepreneurial questions and issues and learnings you have throughout all these years building your company. With everyone here in the audience to take away specific learnings, takeaways how you built this great or big company now. It was not easy in the very early innings. It was sometimes very tough and difficult. But did you have that one aha moment where you said okay this might actually become pretty big?
Yeah, I think we had a couple. The first one was when we had the student tour guide business that I originally pitched you and it just completely didn't work and we had this Swiss rafting tour supplier who called us up and basically said, 'We want to list on your platform. We're even willing to pay for it.' And we had zero bookings from the student tour guides. Then suddenly the professional tour guiding company inbounded and I was like, 'Oh my god, we're probably in the wrong market.' Then I did kind of an easy market analysis of how big travel and tourism is for local experiences. And it was like any way I could do the calculation, the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower and the river cruise in Berlin and Neuschwanstein in Munich, it all added up to this gigantic number. So I was like, wow, that was clearly a light bulb moment where this actually looks really interesting. The second one was when the roaming charges in the EU were lifted. Regulation really enabled business models. Travelers had their smartphones in their pockets and were browsing for things to do in destinations. We saw rapid growth of traffic and more people using the product. It's very similar to what you've experienced where suddenly all your friends and family show up and say, 'I actually booked with you guys. This is really cool.' I vividly remember it was like 2015 or 2016, every Christmas my family gets together and up to that point everyone was like, 'Johannes, are you okay? Do you survive? Is the business somehow okay?' And then at some point it flipped to 'Can you give us a voucher for our next trip?' And I was like, okay, I knew that's the moment.
I can tell you related to that, but before that kicked in I remember you had a tough time to raise capital. All the investors turned you down and I still remember that from Amando and from ID now. The first round was super tough. People are like, 'Maybe this doesn't work, etc.' So how did you then stay motivated? Because I can feel several of us in the room trying to fundraise first round doesn't work, right? How did you then stay motivated?
For the audience in the room, most people don't remember but from 2010 to 2015, if you weren't a pocket internet company, it was basically impossible to raise a lot of capital. People looked at us and were like, 'You're a first-time founder straight out of university. You don't have any clue about business. Clearly, we're not going to give you cash.' I was turned down from a lot of investors at the seed and series A stage who said, 'You're not profitable, so we're not going to give you money.' I was like, 'If I'm profitable, why would I raise?'. It was very difficult and we had to persevere through so many tough moments. We literally went bankrupt at the end of every travel season and I had to raise friends and family rounds and pull some strings together. It was only until 2014-15 that the venture ecosystem really started to blossom in Europe. I had to raise capital from the United States because no one in Europe wanted to give me any money because they didn't see the vision for local travel experiences. I always make the joke that I became status on Lufthansa flying economy class only to Silicon Valley back and forth. At the time you had partner meetings always on Monday, so I had to go on Sunday, come back on Tuesday, work at the company, and then next Monday I was back in San Francisco. It took at least 50 or 60 meetings before we got the first term sheet. So it was a very, very tough time.
That's the reality of fundraising, right? You have to go through it all the time. You have to do it for a very long period of time. You constantly need to create that scarcity, that feeling that this is actually a hot company, this is a hot moment. But for us, that took years to build up.
Yeah. Let's chat about your industry. GetYourGuide is in the experiences industry. Back then it was perceived as a low margin industry. Why is it attractive? Why do you want to build a business in that industry? So what was the conventional wisdom that everyone was wrong? Because obviously it's a big company now.
So two things. One, people at the time—and you still remember this from the early Amando days—there was this mindset that there are online businesses and offline businesses, which is completely crazy if you think about it today. We were in the bucket of 'this is going to stay offline' because it's so cumbersome, a million small merchants, very small transactions around 100 euros. People had the notion that hotels and vacation rentals are online but experiences will remain offline, at concierge desks and people will just randomly walk up. That was a huge misperception. Thankfully we got that one right. The other was the size of the market itself. What people didn't appreciate was that the rise of social media, Instagram and later TikTok, fueled that experience economy. People no longer just thought 'where do I stay' but 'what do I do'. That became the central thing in planning the trip, at the very top of the funnel as well as during the trip when you want to max out and do more things. That really fueled the growth of the company and the overall market.
I mean ultimately you build a marketplace, right? Marketplace with supply and demand. It's super challenging to build a marketplace because you have to tune the right levers in supply and demand. Otherwise you don't have supply, you don't have demand. We all know that problem. How did you treat that?
Yeah, for us it's even a little bit harder because we are a global marketplace and people only repeat so often in travel. We really needed to go through multiple years before we had that frequency, both on the customer side where people were using us multiple times a year, and on the supply side that we would have coverage so they could use us in multiple cities. It was really building up a network. The good thing we have in Europe, and that's why GetYourGuide is a global market leader based out of Europe, is that we have some of the biggest cultural institutions and cities: Rome, Paris, London, Milan, Munich, Berlin. All huge cities people travel to. What we excelled at in the early days is to bring the market online where it was completely offline. The Vatican museums were completely offline and we turned them online. The Louvre was completely offline. We were the first company really selling these tickets to travelers across Europe online. That stronghold in these key institutions and cities was the core of the network we built up over time. But it did take all that time to prove it works because of the low frequency in travel.
And do you have several teams for that? Like one supply team, one demand team, or how do you do it from the very get-go?
We had one demand team, one core platform team, and one supply team.
