WeRoad, the story of an incredible adventure. One year later.
Growth, Velocity, hiring, marketing, culture and scaling up. Everything we’ve done in the last 12 months. SPOILER: our bootstrap phase has been over for a while.
The story of the second year of WeRoad, told by our co-founder Fabio (published in march 21st 2018)
DISCLAIMER:
This article is full of self-celebration. But we believe in WeRoad like crazy. So whether or not you want to read this, it’s your call, but I needed to write this. Also, it’s pretty long, so be ready.?
Exactly one year ago, I wrote an article about the first year of WeRoad’s life and I talked about how, from an idea, in just a few months we built a product first, a company then but most importantly we built a solid travellers community.
Back then we didn’t know where we were going, and we didn’t know what was about to happen as well. We didn’t even have the slightest idea of what we would’ve achieved. It has been such an intense journey it felt like 5 years, even though it has only been 12 months. But after all, when you do something you’re fully passionate about, you really don’t feel like time is passing and yet, you feel like you’ve been doing it for a lifetime.??
Here we go:
Right after I wrote the last article, exactly 11 months ago, we thought about speeding up WeRoad’s growth, and we decided we should’ve opened up to outside investors.?
We didn't want to do the usual round with a fund acting as lead investor and imposing its conditions. We also wanted to put people at the centre of the round. Entrepreneurs who could look us in the eye and fully understand what we were building.?
I more or less knew all the other realities that took a similar direction, and I always thought that the road towards an investor round would be long and winding. I imagined the usual journey where the CEO of a startup focuses 100% of his time for fundraising and a lot of
I knew - more or less closely - other companies that had followed a similar path, and I had always had the idea that the road to a round was long and winding. The classic path that sees the CEO of a start-up devote himself body and soul to fundraising and then a lot of celebrating at the end of the operation.? As if the round were a goal and not a means.
So, when on April 13th 2018 we closed WeRoad’s investor’s deck, I would’ve never imagined that Paolo, our CEO, would’ve closed the operation in just two months. It took the same exact time to launch WeRoad (from the idea to the first itineraries available on the website). Crazy. Just crazy.
We’ve never wanted to advertise this because we wanted the focus of this operation was never to communicate it to the startup ecosystem, but we were interested in developing our business and getting even more known by our actual target audience: travelers!?
If I tell you about it here now it is simply because doing the round turned out to be a winning choice. It brought us a network of incredible people who are advising us and allowed us to bring super talent on board. But it also gave us a very clear direction of where we wanted to go. And of course it gave us the tools to further accelerate our growth.
Then we did the rest.
A few numbers.
In the previous episode, I wrote that we had taken 600 people on the trip and that we were expecting 1,500 by the summer.
Well, we were wrong with that prediction.
At the end of our management year there were 2,500. This year it will be 8,000.
Summer 2018 was a real baptism of fire for us in terms of operations. We also had natural disasters. But we handled it great. In September, we put together a video of the footage our coordinators had filmed in the various destinations to celebrate our first "real" season.
It features the incredible landscapes of our adventures, but above all our WeRoaders and coordinators having the most amazing experiences.
For the record: every time we watch it or present it at some event, we in the team or our coordinators get teary-eyed. I'll put it below.
A year ago our social media numbers were already significant (132,000 fans on our Facebook page, 16,000 on our Facebook Group and 36,000 followers on Instagram).
I now look at those numbers with a mixture of tenderness and benevolence. They seemed enormous to me.
Now there are over 320,000 on Facebook, 44,000 in the group and 187,000 on Instagram (x5).
The most incredible thing is that in the group travel segment, and in particular Youth Adventure Travel, WeRoad has become the first account in Europe and the second in the world (respectively ahead of G-Adventure and behind Contiki, the two global giants that Paolo and I had travelled with and were partly inspired by).
As I have mentioned in a few posts, we are always very proud of these numbers, which are not vanity metrics but, on the contrary, are completely functional to our marketing strategy and community development.
But I'll talk more about this below, save it for later.
Data: march 2019
?Allright, but how is the business doing? You may be wondering.?
With the first season done and our whole model tested, we had to start playing in earnest.
Among the biggest challenges we faced was setting up an infrastructure to support scale up.
Going from 8 to 20 destinations was challenging in the bootstrap phase, but going from 20 to 80 requires a lot of effort in terms of travel design, buying and logistics.
Going from 40 coordinators to 300 also requires effort.
Often in the world of growth hacking we talk about OMTM (one metric that matters) or the North Star as Sean Ellis calls it.
Well, if you ask any team member what our North Star is, you'll only hear one answer: "WeRoaders, WeRoaders, WeRoaders" aka TRACTION.
But while it's true that our guiding star is the number of WeRoaders who travel with us, it's also true that it wouldn't shine if it weren't accompanied by two other stars, namely satisfaction (maintaining an average rating of 9.1 out of 10 for both the travel experience and coordinator evaluations) and customer centricity, which is our main focus.?
Keeping ratings high means making an excellent product.
Being customer centric means that around the product (which has to be excellent) the whole customer experience has to be extraordinary: from the first contact with a marketing communication to what happens before and after the trip.
To do all this we needed people and structure, maintaining flexibility of thought, creative problem solving, speed of execution and, above all, a great ability not to betray ourselves and not to lose ourselves as we went from a team of 10 people to a team of over 40. I like to think of Bezos' famous passage on customer delight: "We can have the scope and capabilities of a large company and the spirit and heart of a small one".
We put the processes on track and then changed them. Once, twice, ten times, a hundred times. We have structured, restructured, abandoned and reintroduced them. We have continuously optimised them. In order to be quick and unloaded on the ground, we have used very light tools, sometimes even no tools at all, and then, once the process was stabilised, we built customised software around it, all in-house, always guided by the mantra of concreteness and speed of execution.
But as I told you at the beginning, in twelve months we have done quite a lot of things and every day we dump something new on the ground. We are hyperactive and we can't stop, really. I'll tell you just the most obvious ones on the consumer front.
We have opened over 30 new destinations and another 20 will arrive before the summer. I assure you it's not easy, just think of how many activities, in addition to travel design, there are from the point of view of negotiation, buying and management of each individual shift.?
In response to feedback from our users, we have expanded our travel segment to include not only the core segment (millennials) but also 35+ (now 40+).
We went from 40 to 200 coordinators (and will be 300 before the summer), revising and improving an already structured recruiting and training process that has now become bullet proof. A three-step selection process culminating in a 3-day Bootcamp of intense training where every moment is a training moment and which puts aspiring coordinators to the test.
We developed from scratch an end-to-end management platform for the coordinator's life (from the first application to career paths)
We have created new types of special itineraries such as those with Wow Accomodation (very special facilities for an experience within an experience) or Backpakers itineraries, designed for those who want extreme adventure with nights exclusively in tents and long hours of trekking, as in the Iceland Trekking Adventure trip.
We have opened applications for our internationalisation project with a format that includes a bootcamp and a beta trip (free of charge) in which aspiring team members?
All this while continuing to run the current business, launching and optimising processes and hiring.
Yes, because it goes without saying that without people, nothing gets done.
And here comes the hiring chapter.
Hiring has been (and still is) very difficult, because we demand a very high level of commitment. And an unbridled love for WeRoad. Every time Erika and I (Head of Strategy and super captain of our ship) see a candidate, even an outstanding one, and something doesn't convince us, almost always the reason is the same. We look at each other and say: "Too bad, he would be perfect. But he doesn't like WeRoad enough. And yet we did it.
The team has grown from 10 to 46 people (as I write).
But it has to be said that while it is difficult to find the right people, the quantity and quality of the profiles that have applied is incredible. Many foreign guys who have applied for a small Italian company (!!!) and many professionals with excellent careers who have fallen in love with WeRoad. So in our team there are talents coming from Foodora, Groupon, Trivago, Honor, Ferrari, EF, ValueLab, The Level Group and even Airbnb!. All highly committed, all 100% integrated into the team from day one.
Because the team is one of WeRoad's secrets.
All passionate travellers, all who are themselves the first WeRoaders.
All with a desire to do and an ability to execute that is incredible.
Paolo wrote in one of his posts: "I don't know how to explain it to those who don't work with us in the office, but the atmosphere in WeRoad is really crazy, a unique concentration of professionalism, desire to write history, to grow as fast as possible, to turn every idea into reality in zero time". Well, that sort of thing, I couldn't say it better myself.?
Within our unique corporate culture, innovation, ideas, solutions for improvement, the excitement for results, constantly flow. I have never seen a clash or an argument, I have just always seen people motivated to improve the product.?
I'll give you an example that is really significant, assuming that we are not a "technology" company or that our core business is software development. All of you reading this, I imagine, have had to deal with both technology and developers.
And it's not always an easy relationship between business and dev.
At WeRoad, this is different, too.
Our devs participate 100% in the life of the business and the product (one of them even became a coordinator), and every day they throw out new ideas and solutions, often before they are requested. They have christened themselves "WeRoad Monkeys" and created a super fun newsletter (the Monkey's Bulletin) that has become one of the team's most eagerly awaited reads. In between lines of code, they give HR tips on how to find other dev colleagues and have even managed to find the time to make their own WeRoad Monkeys branded sweatshirts :).
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?But WeRoad is not 'only' made up of the team in the office.
It's also made up of the coordinators who travel the world with our WeRoaders and who have become a real community within a community, with an incredible sense of belonging to the brand.
For some people, being a WeRoad coordinator means becoming part of a community of travellers and changing their lives once or twice a year when they go travelling. I'm thinking for example of Margherita (in life she manages a pharmacy) who only this summer was a WeRoader on her first trip to Brazil and who now, after having passed the selections and become coordinator, is leading a tour in Thailand. For others it is something that has already changed their lives: young people who have quit their jobs and become full-time travellers or have joined our team.
And what about marketing?
Well, WeRoad is what it is because of the way we have always communicated.
The mantra of the marketing team is just one. We never get tired of repeating it.
Ad = Content, Content = Ad.
In other words, not advertising, but content.
And we have always worked hard on this, believing in a long funnel that works hard on engagement and interaction between users and content.
We produce entirely in-house, inspiring, entertaining content, dedicated to destinations or to the idea of travel as a life-changing experience, and a thousand others. To date we have around 40 different content formats including Instagram stories, posts, live feeds from destinations, newsletters, etc. Often when I think about the future of WeRoad I see it (in part) as a media company because of the quantity and quality of content developed.
Let me show you some of them.
Below are a couple of examples from the Once-in-a-lifetime format such as snowboarding in the desert:
...or hang-gliding in the skies over Rio:
Never stop cracking a smile in everyday life, like we do with memes:
...or with formats like Food Bizarre or Hungry Wednesday in which we tell the real experiences of tasting WeRoaders of the strangest foods around the world:
But among the content we produce, those that are at the heart of our strategy are those that put people at the centre.
Whether it's the coordinators and groups on the road with live stories, whether it's the returned WeRoaders talking about their experiences or team members talking about the launch of a new destination, people are the most important part of our whole project.
That's why we work so hard on social proof and testimonials from those who have already travelled with us.
Like this one below.
But the content would be pointless if it didn't lead to interaction, to deepening, to opening a conversation with WeRoad or the coordinators or other WeRoaders and, ultimately, to conversion.
Does it work?
Well, it seems to be, since 40% of users say they were convinced to book after following us on social media and liking the content :)
?
Image Translation:
What inspired you to book with WeRoad?
BLUE: Friends and acquaintances spoke highly of them
YELLOW: The website was clear and inspiring
GREEN: The customer service on WhatsApp and via call cleared any doubts before leaving.
PURPLE: I have been following WeRoad for a while and love their content.
TEAL: I found them on their Facebook Group.
?
But I also want to tell you a little story within a story, which triangulates product, marketing and people's lives.
WeRoad has a newsletter which, like any newsletter, is used to promote destinations or offers. However, it treats these topics with the same tone of voice and language as our social content, so with an approach that is not at all commercial but, on the contrary, extremely fun (with an average open rate of almost 50% and an average CTR of 5% vs. a travel industry average of 9.5% and 0.8% respectively, according to Mailchimp).
A few months ago, after sending the newsletter, we received an email, or rather a reply to the newsletter itself, from a girl who had already participated in a WeRoad trip to Morocco.
What did she say?
That she, an introverted single woman, who left without any expectations, had found love under the wing of a plane in Marrakech.
She closed the email - and here I quote: 'I'm glad I clicked "book now", because I will always have WeRoad to thank for the great gift it gave me. I love you WeRoaders, with love".
Although we are customer centric, we never expected to be able to establish such a strong connection with our participants. For a team like ours you can't imagine what this email meant, in terms of satisfaction, motivation and a real sense that we can really make an impact on people with our work.?
But it didn't end there.
Since putting people at the centre and creating content is an obsession for us, what did we do? On Valentine's Day we thought of her. We proposed doing a double interview with her and her boyfriend for our Instagram accounts. The result? To date, it's one of the videos with the highest organic views.
VIDEO MAROCCO
I told you this story within the story to let you know how important our WeRoaders and the relationship with them are to us. And this brings us straight to the final part of this post where I want to tell you about our first offline campaign.?
At a certain point we felt the need to get out of the comfort zone of social media and communicate to a wider audience.
And we decided to do it with an Out of Home campaign, for now in Milan.
The challenge was one of creativity.
How to take our way of communicating out of social and digital?
How to reduce our always engagement-oriented communication to a static billboard?
We didn't want to confuse ourselves with traditional tour operators, nor with tourism promotion agencies. And at the same time we wanted to communicate group travel, the opportunity to make new friends on the road (which is an integral part of the WeRoad travel experience), and the idea that we travel the world.
In the end, it didn't take us long to realise that, with our obsession for storytelling and customer centricity, we had to start with an offline communication that would focus on the faces of the people in our community, the faces of the WeRoaders.
This is why we didn't want to tell our story with manufactured photos or the use of actors, but directly with the UGC photos of our trips. Or rather, with selfies, taken spontaneously by the WeRoaders with their smartphones.
WeRoad? primarily speaks to millennials and the selfie is the grammar of the target. Images that capture moments actually experienced, with the group of friends formed on the road, in real situations. Each shot bears the name of the author and the place where it was taken. We have chosen seven. You can find some of them below.
So, not without an ambition that may seem disproportionate, our goal is to become, for the travel segment, or rather travel experiences, a reality like those that have successfully entered our everyday lives: Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb.
That's where we are aiming.
And when, not one, not two, but dozens of brilliant candidates who are in Berlin, London or Madrid, with great career paths ahead of them, get on a plane to come for a one-day assessment in Milan and, during an interview, tell you that they want to work in WeRoad because they see it as potentially like Airbnb, you realise that, at last, maybe we are going in the right direction.
So, if you've made it this far, good on you, because the post was a bit long. But perhaps WeRoad has intrigued you. So I'll tell you that there is still room in our project.
?And if you simply want to see what we do every day, follow us on Instagram but, even better, join the FB group WeRoad Conosciamoci prima di partire, where you can meet fellow travellers and see the magic of those who have left and already returned.
Over and out, for now.
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