WeRoad, Year 3.
Growth, international expansion, culture. Everything that has happened to WeRoad in the last 12 months in the transition from start-up to scale-up (bottom line: scale up is a lot more difficult, especially amidst a global pandemic).
The usual annual mega-recap told by or co-founder Fabio (published on 21st March 2020)
Today is technically WeRoad's third birthday.
It has been 36 months since our website went live. Back then, we had 8 itineraries, a few coordinators, we were just a bunch of people and most of us weren’t even working full time.
It feels like a lifetime ago.
First things first though: let’s sum up what I’ve already told you?
Two years ago I wrote a very long post on LinkedIn talking about our exciting first year as a bootstrap where we built our project from scratch. I talked about how it all started; the idea, to the logo design, website, first booking and our first tour. Then the interest around WeRoad grew more and more.
Last year I wrote a second post that you’ll find here in which I talked about the following year. That enthusiasm from the beginning continued and even grew stronger as the numbers started to roll in. We continued to celebrate every single booking that came in (I gave a hotel reception bell to the sales team, and every time there was a new sale you could hear ding! ding! ding!). Our project had grown so much, and so many new people had come on board to share our dream and make it their own. We quickly found ourselves with around thirty people and about eighty coordinators. That's when we realised that we had moved from the bootstrap phase to the start-up phase. And we realised that we could do something great.?
They were two brutally honest posts, written straight from the heart, in which I told our story with great transparency and authenticity. Many people read them. Some of them got excited, wrote to us, we got to know each other and are now part of our team. At the interviews someone said to me: "I am here because of the way you told your story, you all are something unique". Wow.
For a few weeks now I have been thinking that I could ideally write a third post, telling you about this third year. I had initially imagined it to be very different from the previous ones. I wasn't even sure if I was going to do it, for various reasons, but also because of the absurdity of the pandemic.
Then today I saw on Instagram a story by Marcello (with us since day zero) and I thought 'Fuck it. I like telling stories, and fuck it, today is WeRoad's birthday."
This story is my birthday present to everyone who is and has been on board this adventure, and to all the WeRoaders who have travelled with us.
If you thought the previous two chapters were full on, just wait until the rollercoaster of year 3.?
Here it is.
Alright, let’s begin.
Let’s start off with the good stuff.
Polar Stars (and believing in them) AKA Road to 8,000.
I'll start with the successes. You should know, back when we made the first WeRoad business plan we set a goal to take 5,200 people around the world (in one year). That year should have been 2019.
In the first few months of last year our numbers were good, absolutely in line with the plan, but we weren't in it. We felt like they weren't good enough. We were restless. Every day we looked at the number of bookings coming in and said...fuck...when are we going to get at least 50 bookings a day? Frankly, neither Paolo, our CEO, nor Erika, our co-founder, nor the rest of the team wanted to "wait" for the numbers to grow. We wanted to hit the ground running. It was a real obsession for everyone, especially Marcello and I, who had been watching the two cigars for months that were to be enjoyed when we managed to break 50 bookings a day. In that climate of positive restlessness, at a certain point we said to ourselves that we could do more. Much more.
We told ourselves that we could aim for 8,000.
Nobody asked us to do it. It was something we 'felt'. And we felt that in order to achieve it, the first step would be to say: we can do it! I remember the first time we told this to the team.
The reaction?
Stress? Worry?
Nope.
The whole team responded instinctively: 'Cool, yeah we're doing it'. And they believed in it right away. Then, little by little, that number became iconic for the whole team. It was the mother of our OKRs. It became a hashtag (#roadto8000). It became a t-shirt with which we celebrated the arrival of summer (the season where we would play for everything). It has been our guiding star over these past months.
On 1st April last year (and there's a lot to be said for our April Fools' Day) we passed 50 bookings in one day for the first time. When we hit the number at 10pm, we were reduced to sheer joy, literally like kids at Disneyland. We lit our cigar and celebrated with the team. It is incredible to think now that this joy, a few months later, would have seemed almost naive in comparison with the much higher numbers achieved in the months that followed.
And then? How did it end?
Two months ahead of the end of our management year plan, we achieved that goal.
This picture here, with the whole team celebrating 8,000 bookings, is one of the photos I remember most fondly.?
It was one of the most beautiful WeRoad moments, it repaid us for all the tireless effort, hard work belief.
I remember the moment perfectly when the whole team was waiting to celebrate the eight thousandth traveller who booked, set up on a live screen display of the website that the Monkeys (our devs) had prepared.?
I wonder if Facebook, at its first 8000 users or AirBnB at its first 8000 guests felt the same...
I never told this to Marghe but, not without a massaged ego (which surely also comes from doing what you love and doing it successfully), I thought of the scene in The Social network where Sean Parker celebrates his first million users.
But back to us. How did that year end? Well, not only did we reach our pole star of 8,000 but we ended up with 9,300. That's basically double what we were expecting. Practically ahead of the business plan by a year. Not bad, huh?
And so, since we were so far ahead, we decided to anticipate international expansion as well.?
Starting with Spain, because let's face it, we thought that from a cultural point of view, it was the country where it would be easier to test and validate our model, where people and coordinators play a fundamental role.
So last summer we opened in Spain.
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Spain: a story in a story
It was either june or july
Paolo and I were sitting in a bar in Madrid, drinking a beer, when we met Inigo .?
Referred to us by our Google account, Inigo is a former Google employee who had changed his life, returned to Madrid from Dublin to work in a food delivery start-up, very networked, with the right attitude. When I asked him why he'd left Google, he told me: 'Because it's a really cool place where there are super smart people, it's great, but it's just OK if you want a quiet life. Maybe when I'm 40 I'll go back.?
I fell in love immediately. Paolo immediately noticed his interpersonal skills, which are essential for starting and managing the community of coordinators in Spain. We'll have to wait a few more months, but Inigo will be our Country Manager. Target to open sales in Spain: January 2020.
Watch these dates carefully: it's September 2019, we have only a few months to do the operations setup, I'm pretty confident that in three months we can easily put it all together.
Well, it definitely didn’t go like that.
One day at the end of September, Paolo, who is a bootstrapper at heart, tells the Expansion micro-team led by Erika: "Guys, we can't wait until January. Let's come up with something to enter the market in October, I want at least 5 groups of Spanish WeRoaders around the world by New Year's Eve".
Ouch.
This is Paolo. A real entrepreneur, a person who knows how to make things happen.
Believe it or not, and I'm not going to tell you about the efforts by our devs, the Coordinators team and the Spain team (Angelo, Inigo, Julia our voice of WeRoad Spain, and Pit), we opened the sales in October. And it started all over again. Booking by booking. Like two and a half years earlier in Italy.
By New Year's Eve we had 56 WeRoaders travelling the world. Three months ahead of schedule.?
But the coolest thing about starting in Spain was seeing it all begin again.
Seeing the same dynamics repeat. The creation of content (we discovered that Carolina, content marketer of our team speaks perfect Spanish, so gets straight to telling stories in Spanish together with Julia), the Facebook Community, the first Spanish coordinators recruited largely through the network of Italian coordinators. The first AperiRoad in Spain (WeBares), the first reactions of the Spanish WeRoaders, groups of Spanish and Italian WeRoaders who met by chance on the other side of the world and became friends.
You can’t even imagine my happiness.
When Marcello and I were deciding in February which OOH spaces to buy in Madrid for our launch campaign, we looked at each other and said: would you have ever imagined this ten months ago, at the time of that photo with the cigar?
And a new chapter begins. The logistical one.
We start to work with a multi-country mindset and think about how to organise the work between HQ (yes, we have become an HQ!) and the countries.
From start-up to scale-up + culture & many other things.
This was the most difficult part.
Going from an environment where you know everyone around you and where you understand each other telepathically, to a company of 70 people where you start not knowing the newcomers very well is not easy. Same thing with coordinators: 40 you know them personally. 80 you start to struggle. But 400, well, that's another story. And relationships and management styles also change. And as business increases, the complexity increases (I think Erika has used the phrase "new level of complexity" at least a 1000 times this year...), you have to change. You are no longer a team of startuppers. You are an established company.
You have to reorganise, change your mindset, and bring in people with scale-up experience. You have to move from a team of developers developing in a makeshift garage to a team developing in Silicon Valley. You have to start looking at the accounts surgically.?
It's something else entirely. Described perfectly in this very clearly titled piece by Eric Jorgenson Why Growing Past 20 Employees is so Damn Hard (and what you can do about it) which tells exactly what happens (and what happened to us).
The only thing you can do is try to scale up without losing your soul, one of my most persistent obsessions.
The transition from start-up to scale-up is where most companies fail. And it's the one where working on Culture is crucial. A very strong and pervasive culture in the start-up phase, but it needed to be formalised for the scale-up phase, for the new onboarding.
So we worked on defining our Vision and Mission, our values and our Culture Manifesto.?
I believe that our vision Connecting People, Cultures and Stories is the quintessence of what WeRoad is and what we wanted to do from the very beginning. Connecting people, their stories and bringing them into contact with new cultures. WeRoad is a human business, based on people's reactions. And travel is the tool.
But we have a very strong disruptive and business component in us which has been translated into our Mission: Design and deliver experiences worth living and sharing, rewriting the rules of the travel industry, every f*cking step of the way.
There is the idea of creating memorable experiences, there is the idea of rewriting the rules of the travel industry. And to continuously innovate. 3
Every time I read it again I say to myself: that's really us.?
And the same for our core values that identify us: Passion (we take pride in what we do), Discovery (we aren’t afraid to get out of our comfort zones), Daring (we challenge the status quo), Sharing (we are one team), Respect (we travel and treat other with respect), Why this fixation on values and Culture? Why do we think it is so important?
Just ask Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky:
“When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. People can be independent, autonomous, and entrepreneurial. And if we have a company that is entrepreneurial in spirit, we will be able to take our next ‘(wo)man on the moon’ leap.”
Or you could’ve asked it to Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh:
“If you get the culture right, most of the other stuff will just happen naturally on its own.”
So with Erika and Allyn, who was our Senior People & Culture Manager, we wrote our Culture Manifesto.??
A "living document" that describes the company culture and at the same time is a snapshot of what it means (and what to expect from) working at WeRoad, and a guide to living our core values. But also a kind of "Oath of Employment". Because working at WeRoad is cool and something that can give you incredible satisfaction. But WeRoad is not for everyone, and everyone is not for WeRoad. That's why in the selection phase, the Culture Manifesto is also a tool to set mutual expectations between us and a candidate. And ultimately a tool for scaling the culture, aligning ourselves, attracting new talent but also filtering. Because ultimately as Cameron Sepah writes in this article "Your Company Culture is Who You Hire, Fire, and Promote".
Our Culture Manifesto is the thing I am perhaps most proud of.
here’s the first page:
?All bullshit you say? Read on.
?Touching people's lives
Surely many may think that these are "soft" things, for "people", not for business. But therein lies the mistake. When I talk about WeRoad, I always say that it's a different business, a business that touches people's lives. And that it is a privilege to be able to do a business of this kind.
I spoke about this at our Reunion Party in October 2019. There were a thousand of us from all over Italy, including WeRoaders, team members and coordinators. Before the party started there were some internal speeches. Among them was my own, entitled “Belonging”, in which I talked about how WeRoad provides life-changing experiences.
It changes it for the WeRoaders who start dozens of new friendships, for the community of coordinators who travel the world and establish thousands of relationships. It changes it for us in the team who work on it and feel a part of it.
I'm always trying to make people who aren't in direct contact with our world understand this, and I realise how difficult it is to convey it if you don't experience it first hand. A friend of mine once said to me: 'you're practically a cult'. It wasn’t necessarily a compliment, but it gives an idea of the sense of belonging and bonding that exists in the WeRoad world.
Seriously, feel free to do a live test. If you happen to meet one of our coordinators, ask what WeRoad means to them.
I'll just leave you with two examples below of posts from two of our coordinators, just to give you a little insight into what I mean.
This is Maddalena ’s and it was made one day before the Reunion Party in October (transaltion below):
Translation: Guys here we are! Tomorrow is a big day! I’m rubbish with photos (Simona Perugnini knows a thing or two though!), so i’ll share a few words instead of what tomorrow means to me…? When I began at WeRoad, we were no more than 40 odd, we knew each other inside and out, and if something wasn’t right we would just sort it out directly there and then. Now we’re over 300 and growing. So many things have changed. Hats off to the whole team, the coordinators, management, the designing of the trips from the mere idea to the moment when we get home, sleep deprived and yet infinitely enriched.? I don’t know you all personally, some of us we have only spoken on the phone, with others we’ve exchanged pleasantries, the rest, well I'll see you tomorrow! We work for a sensational company, of which we’re immensely proud. I feel such a sense of belonging to this amazing, vast family. When we wear our badges, push our WeRoaders to explore and do things they’ve never done before, watching their faces fill with delight, we have so much fun.?
Here’s Davide ’s, made a few days ago (translation below):
Translation: I also wanted to reflect quickly. Hi I’m Davide, WeRoad and Radiologist for (ahem) a Covid Centre. Before my night shift starts, I decided to throw on my WeRoad shirt for two reasons.? The first is pride, pride to be able to encapsulate the two sides of my persona perfectly. The second is gratitude for WeRoad, it’s such a hard time for everyone, and yet they continue to inspire us and promise us that we’ll travel again. We’ll come out of this stronger, more inspired and ready to explore all the corners of this wonderful world.?
Recently, in a very scathing critique of our Out of Home campaign on Covid (more on that later), someone accused us of being solely interested in business, of lacking purpose and ethics. Honestly, I am deeply saddened by this superficial opinion of what we do, because it couldn’t be further from the truth.
And I'll give you a couple of reviews below just to make you understand what I mean when I say that we do business that "touches people's lives".
You can read all the reviews, good and bad, right here .?
Then of course there is ambition.
The kind of numbers that take you from a few hundred travellers to over 15,000 in two years. The ambition to disrupt a sector. That of growth and internationalisation. That of becoming a Unicorn and looking up to the really cool companies like Airbnb, Netflix, and Spotify. Some people tell me we have unbridled and unrealistic ambition.
But I assure you, for us being part of this thing, none of it would make sense if we weren't creating a business with our soul.
If we weren't part of this wonderful machine that touches people's lives.
Covid-19 Part 1 (It's just marketing after all)
Well, that brings us up to date.
Let's talk about light things first, namely marketing.
I don't want to hide behind our out of home campaign in Milan. So I'll tell you about it without any frills. At the beginning of the emergency, when everything was all mixed up and there was a lot of conflicting information, we thought we'd make a statement in line with our tone of voice, and our irony (after all being bold is amongst our core values). We know that our campaigns don't always please (or seek to please) everyone.
Back in December, we did something a bit over the top, but "very WeRoad", with the campaign on "wasting the Christmas bonus".?
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Having said that, do you know of any other tour operators who communicate like this?
Our point of view is very clear: if you don't have the sense of humour to understand the message of “wasting the Christmas bonus” and prefer ‘safe’ advertising campaigns with the beach, you are probably not our target audience.
But let's get to the quarantine campaign, which has been the subject of much attention (both positive and negative). Let me contextualise a little better the moment in which it was born, especially from the point of view of the tourism sector. At the beginning of the crisis, the Covid situation seemed to concern only Asia, the first rumours about Italy led to the closure of borders by some countries, forcing tour operators to cancel their trips. In Milan the #Milanononsiferma campaign had started, endorsed also by the Mayor Beppe Sala. We may have been hasty and a little optimistic, and we came out with a campaign that, in my opinion, was wrong only in its timing, because it was published just before the first restrictive measures of the government came out.
It was, and is in my opinion, an ironic campaign with a strong sense of positivity. It reads: ‘ Italy in quarantine? Lucky for us we’re in the most beautiful country in the world. 7,9914km of coastline (4,917km of beaches).?
A sea of criticism from various communication experts ensued (and yes, even from some of our target audience). IMHO, the campaign is still a nice piece of marketing that enhances the value of Italy.
The fact is that, given the context, which had changed completely in the space of a few minutes, we felt that the campaign was no longer appropriate and potentially misleading. We withdrew it on the fly. We reworked it in record time (a few hours), unleashing a new creative campaign to replace it.?
The next day we put out the new campaign (this one below): ‘You can always travel with your imagination’, additionally adapting the editorial plan of our social networks. We filled our feed with activities to do at home, staying in touch and meeting new people via chat. Moral of the story: lesson learned, probably next time we’ll think twice before doing an offline on the fly.
?Covid-19 Part 2 (Let's talk about serious things AKA crisis management)
But communication is the superficial part of what we did (and are doing) in the days of the crisis. Those who know us best, know how we have worked on the emergency operations management front, on a crisis that, unlike 'normal' crises (exceptional events that are, however, limited in time), immediately turned into a marathon. It was a crisis characterised by total uncertainty, in which hour after hour a border closed or reopened, flights were changed or cancelled.
Imagine our Travel and Customer Care teams in constant contact day and night (and that's not just a figure of speech) with our local partners around the world for first-hand information. Think about the non-stop monitoring of information on Viaggiaresicuri , but also daily contact with the Embassies of the countries where we travel, and especially with all our groups travelling around the world.
Leading the operations is a specially created Crisis Management Team (CMT), which assesses all cases for each trip every morning and follows them up throughout the day. All this while keeping the machine running smoothly even with the entire company working from home.
In this way, we were able to provide vouchers for hundreds of WeRoaders who were unable to leave because of the Coronavirus. And we helped just as many travelling WeRoaders to return home, even with adventures and detours, before further borders closed.
I can assure you that this is no mean feat, we worked like clockwork.
And now?
Travel is certainly the sector most directly affected by this crisis.?
But unfortunately it is not destined to be the only one. This is the first time the world has experienced such a situation, with such a shutdown of social and economic life.?
As Steve Blank says in this masterful piece How Your Startup Can Survive a Worldwide Pandemic (subtitle: It's time to figure out the minimum of what's needed to keep your company alive - and what needs to be left behind), and which in my opinion is about the survival of all businesses, not just startups, the key factor is to become very aware that what we had no longer exists and that we need to prepare for the new normal: ?"Whatever your product/market fit was last month, it’s likely no longer true and needs to change to meet the new normal. Does this open new value propositions or kill others? Does it alter the product?"
And again:
It’s no longer business as usual for the rest of the economy. In fact, shutting down the economy for a pandemic has never happened. Millions of jobs may be lost in the next few months as entire industries become devastated — something not seen since the Great Depression. I hope that I’m wrong, but the coronavirus’ social and economic effects are likely to be profound and will change how we shop, travel, and work for years. If you’re running a startup or small business, your first priority (after your family) is keeping your employees and customers safe.?
But next the question is, “What’s going to happen to my business?”?
Understanding in the coming weeks whether this will be a three-month, one-year or three-year crisis will be crucial. "What's Plan B? And what's in my lifeboat?" asks the good Steve, who also tells us: "Put in place lifeboat plans for a downturn of three months, one year, and three years.
That is what we are doing at the moment.
With the conviction, however, that we will return to travelling, and it will be even better than before. But with the awareness that WeRoad is not only in the travel business, but first and foremost in the business of connecting people, cultures and stories.
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Postscript
It's strange to talk about travel, today 21 March 2020, the first day of spring and WeRoad's third birthday, but I couldn't not do it.
I repeat, this is my gift to WeRoad. To the dreams of all those who are with us or who have experienced our adventures.
There's so much more I could have told you about, for example, the fact that our Instagram account has become the first in the world in terms of followers and engagement rate, ahead of English-speaking giants such as Contiki and G Adventures. Or the micro-competitors that have sprung up like mushrooms, copying our initiatives (still better to have competition than to be alone!). And what about the hacking of our Instagram profile (which I talked about here ) or the cool under the hood stuff the WeRoad Monkeys are doing, or the new Viaggi Express in Italy, or new projects (no spoilers actually), the SEO strategy we're doing between the website and our Stories blog , the inside jokes on the Monkeys website or their unofficial Instagram account or how to use Telegram for marketing. Even Project Walrus and much more.
For now, however, it’s over and out from me.
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