WeRoad: fighting the loneliness crisis through travel

0:00Welcome back to The Serial Entrepreneur. I'm your host Anna Wood. On today's episode, I'm joined by Fabio Bin, the co-founder and CMO of WeRoad. We discuss how WeRoad is tackling the loneliness crisis with travel, connecting people's cultural stories, and a WeRoad marital success story. Let's dig in. Very good. Thanks, sir. Yes, thank you for coming on the podcast today. Always good to have you. Thank you for having me. Thank you. So we begin all of our podcasts with the same question, which is what's your favorite breakfast cereal and why? Oh, I'm prepared by the question, actually. I'm kind of fond of cereals.

0:42So I can tell you, I used to do like mix of different cereals, like all green flakes. And I put some raisins, some oats. and I have all these jars so every morning I like to take some of them from every jar and do the mix. But I also have to say that I like so much to try the cereal from the Surreal guys. So they're in the UK, they're doing amazing campaigns. Bye guys. I'd like to try your cereal sooner or later. Yes, I've actually tried some of the Surreal cereals. They're really nice. So could you begin to introduce yourself and tell me a bit about your background? Yep, I'm Fabio. I stopped working in the media advertising space in the early 2000s.

1:37So I'm quite old. I'm 50. I turned 50 this year. And so basically I will say that I saw the internet evolution from the inception. and I've been working in publishing for about 12, 13 years and I was in the B2B part and taking care of advertising and servers, all this stuff. But my art was about the consumer part. So in 2013, I guess, I moved to the startup world because I found that the corporate environment was too old school in a way. not that dynamic. So I took this leap into the void, I will say, and I moved to the startup world and doing basically everything from product design to consumer marketing.

2:33I basically reinvent myself. And it was a very, very good experience. Tough because I was thinking to be a smart guy when I used to be in the corporate environment. I understood that working with founders and entrepreneurs is a completely different story in terms of speed, adaptation. So it's a very, very good experience. And then after a few years in that space, I co-founded my own company, which is called WeRoad and we do organized trips. Yeah, great. So what is WeRoad in a bit more detail? What is your mission? Yeah, I used to say that we do sell trips. And actually, our trips are meant for people in their 30s.

3:23They're for a small group of people, 8 to 15 people. It's a mainly long tour. And these people, they don't know each other before leaving. So basically, it's a group of strangers that they travel together and they forge a relationship and friendship while traveling. This group is led by a travel coordinator. and this guy, the travel coordinator, is not a professional travel guide that we don't use and we don't want them to be professional travel guides. We want them to be part of the group. So basically, it's a side gig for this person. And you can have your daily job, you can be an employee, you can be a freelancer or whatever, and you decide to spend your free time leading a group.

4:10Of course, we do a kind of strong selection to become travel coordinators. But once you become travel coordinators, you can lead the group. And what we are looking at, or we are looking for when we put these kind of people, is mostly about the team building skills, leadership, because they have to keep the group together. So the product itself is trips, okay? But the real need that we are fulfilling is a completely different one. It is a need for, again, a relationship and friendship. Because the idea started from the personal experience of mine and my co-founder. I was already in my 40s. Paul was in his 30s.

4:57And we were struggling in finding people to travel with. Because, you know, when you are at this age, making your friends is complicated. Maybe some of your friends are already married, they are kids, or they move to another city for a job. It's not like anymore like the uni. You can meet people every day, ending up in dinners and parties. It's different because it's adult life, basically. So the idea was, okay, I have to find someone to travel with and I want to go to a specific destination. So we have to find people to travel with and they're willing to go on a specific kind of tour. Our tours, for example, are on the road tours.

5:38We basically move every day. We change hotels every day. We do a lot of road tripping. You have to enjoy this kind of, this type of vacation, this type of trip. And so the idea is, let's put together people that are willing to do the same tour. But most importantly, let's put together people same age. That's the real deal. And I think it's part of what set us aside from the rest of the tour operators. So we started with a specific age bracket, 25 to 35. Now we have a second age bracket, which is 35 plus, up to 49 basically. But the idea of being part of the same generation is meant for making people mingling and becoming friends easily.

6:30So basically we do organize trips, but we do sell friendships. Yeah, I think it's quite poignant what you say. I think I see a lot online of adults saying that same thing, how adulthood is so different to being a child, but also being in university where friendships are so easy to make because you're constantly around people who want to have those new experiences. Whereas as an adult, as you said, people move on, people move away, that you're still friends, but it's not. Exactly. It's not that you're just going to be like, oh, let's go on holiday in a couple of weeks because everyone's got life stuff going on.

7:07Exactly. It's life stuff going on. It's exactly that's a problem. And I think we exist because of that, because we are adults now and, you know, it's life stuff. So, yeah, your job, maybe your old parents and different schedules to match. That's one of the most important problems, the different schedules. or even the lack of confidence to even to, let's say, to ruin a friendship because, you know, when you go on a trip or with a friend, you don't know how the person is your friend that you know in the real life, but you don't know how he's traveling with him, with her. So I guess it's because of that.

7:46Yeah, travel compatibility is such a thing. You can go on a holiday with friends and realize that half of you want to do, you want to chill for a bit, but also want to see everything. and then someone else is like, oh, I just wanted to sit by the pool all day, which is fair enough. People go on holiday for different reasons. When you realize you've gone on a holiday with someone and you're like, oh, I wanted to do all these other things, and you don't at that point want to go alone as well. So how do you think WeRoad is tackling the, I guess, loneliness crisis that we're seeing right now? This is a very, very good question.

8:19Loneliness crisis, I think, it's kind of a became a mainstream phenomenon i mean is on on every media everyone is talking about that there are researchers saying that for example american people one out of seven they don't have friends and as adults i mean and and this is true so what we have been working on what we are doing since since our inception we were born in 2017 it's exactly this so offer people an occasion to meet new people. Again, the excuse is traveling. So you have free time. You have to go on, you have to fill this free time and you want to go on a holiday, but you don't have any people to travel with.

9:03Okay, that's the first stage. But then you have to, you need the gut to travel with strangers, to do something with strangers, with people you don't know. Once you do that step, it's happening. And it's when you go on a weirdo trip, for example, the first day that we have this welcome meeting where 15 people or strangers is kind of awkward, you know, that no one is confident in saying something and exposing himself. And then the magic is that after a couple of days, since in a trip, we are sharing basically everything. We are sharing transfer. We are sharing rooms. We are eating together. We are imparting together.

9:48There's also good and bad thing happening together. In a couple of days, you click or you don't sometimes, but you click with people. And it seems to you to know these people since a very, very long time. And after 10 days, you look backwards, wow, it's 10 days, it saves an entire life. And again, how we are fighting the long-term crisis is the fact that this experience is not limited to the tour itself. I think, and we are very proud of this. People that go on our wheel tour, they come back and they stay friends. And it's kind of our, even I would say marketing promise. I would say you leave solo, you come back with friends.

10:37And this is true because these people, they regroup, they stay in touch, they do a reunion weekends on their own, or if they're living in the same city, they start hanging out together. It happened even to me. I have people recently celebrated my, again, 50 birthdays. and I invited to my birthday people that I met on our trip. And we are, I wouldn't have imagined to invite people that I just knew like one year ago, but we are hanging out together basically at least once per month. So we are, I guess, enriching and extending the network of friendship in their adult life, in their adult time, I will say.

11:26So this is the straight way to say it. But on top of that, I have to say that we are moving beyond the trips itself because we started, I guess, four or five years ago, just as a marketing channel to run events like we were doing, aperitif nights just to make people get in touch with us, to understand the model, how our trip is, and just to make them know in travel coordinators or the travel coordinators rule. And it turned out that this kind of events, we have many people that travel with us showing up and bringing along new friends, their friends. And these people were meeting new people. So we extended this format.

12:17It's not anymore about like a marketing channel. It became an original format. and it took many, many forms, like from dinners to, I don't know, yoga session at the park on the weekend or hiking parties. It depends. There are just occasions during the year, so aside from the trip itself, to meet new people. So basically, I have to say, you asked me before about our mission, I can tell you that our vision is connecting people, cultural stories. And this is the same vision from day one. And as you can see, it doesn't mention travel or the travel industry. It's just about people and connection between people.

13:02So, yes, I would say so. Great. So what are some examples of the kind of trips that WeRoad offers? Okay. We have different types of trips. I would say the signatures ones are called WeRoad 360, like Thailand 360. It's a typical tour, I would say an entry-level approach to the country that you're going to visit. It has a mix of adventure, nightlife, culture. It tends to be close to the local communities that are important. For example, we tend to avoid the hotel chains. We do prefer local accommodation. And basically, you move every day. You start usually from the capital of the country. You move around the country and you come back to the origin.

13:58The first day, people have an appointment, a meetup for a welcome meeting. So you can, for example, travel flights to the country even a couple of days before you can stay on your own and then you have this welcome meeting. that the tour starts and you stay together for the duration until the end again. And yes, there's a mix of experiences. Again, it can be something more active, something more chill. It depends. Generally speaking, the tour, the 360, very, very balanced. And then we have different tours. They are more, I would say, edgy in a way, like there are more adventures. For example, there's a tour in Iceland that is in trekking, is meant for trekking, and you sleep in tents.

14:46So the tours are even self-selecting a bit the kind of people and the travel style. Or we have tours that are called collection. They are kind of premium, so we ensure that all the accommodation are four or five-star hotels. There's at least one hotel, which is part of the experience itself because it's like a super local gem in the destination. It depends. I think that during speaking, we are like tours. There are, again, the classic one, about 10 days with trip around the country. We are shorter tours. They are like just, they're called express. And there are maybe shorter and even shorter tours for just one or two nights.

15:31There are weekends if you want to do a long weekend or a break every now and then during the year. but all these tours are in common again the fact that you travel with people that you don't know before and they're led by a travel coordinator which is the most important part because again the trip itself is just a background the landscape, everything you're going to see is a landscape for an experience that is made of people connection Yeah, that's really cool so you also mentioned about how you avoid chain hotels Do you think that supporting smaller and more local businesses throughout the travel experience is important?

16:14Yes, it's important for two reasons. One is obviously, I would say, a social reason, I would say. The other one is even the experience that you're providing to the travelers. You cannot, yes, it's a group trip. So it's an organized trip, but we want to be as much as possible, not like a tour operator. We tend to avoid it. We avoid this world, actually, because we don't want to do standard trip, repeating the same experiences that everyone does in a market. So finding experiences that are local, finding accommodation that are local is paramount. But to be told, of course, when the numbers grow, it's harder and harder to find local, small, off-the-beaten-track experiences.

17:12So, for example, for our, I would say, best-seller and top-seller trips, maybe this is, it isn't like the long days. We have to balance this. As a general rule, we want to avoid as much as possible. Not always we are capable of doing so, but we are tours, especially the long tail. They are actually really off the beaten track with super, super local experiences and super, super local accommodation. I guess it's a matter of trade-off on becoming mainstream and destination becoming mainstream and just serving also another kind of a customer that are more oriented to sustainability and also to, again, exclusive experience.

18:00And when I say exclusive, tell me about the fact that they are very, very niche. Yeah, great. So what are some of the challenges that you faced on the WeRoad journey and how did you manage to overcome them? Oh, I guess many, many, as every startup and now, I think we face different challenges at every stage of the company. At the beginning, of course, it was like to reach the decent amount of visibility and customers to be an actual business. So I have to say that we found pretty soon our product market fit, but you know, number to scale, you have to become relevant. And I have to say that was the most energizing part of the business when you start putting some trips.

18:50When we started, we were the two of us and some other people along the way in the first month. We have only eight itineraries. Now consider we have more than 1 ,000 itineraries. So just to give you an example. So we had to start it. And so the challenge was getting product market fit and make a name for us, especially becoming new in the market, in the travel space. Then I think that as soon as we started becoming really relevant and expanding internationally, we faced the global pandemic. 2020, 2022 has been a very, very tough period for us. Consider that some of our advisors told us, guys, you should raise the company, let's see, in a couple of years.

19:44While we kept fighting, we had forelaw, we had everything that was needed. But we even reinvent ourselves, providing consultancy for other companies in the B2B space just to survive. And we redesigned completely our portfolio of offering. For example, let's consider that March 2020, the beginning of the pandemic, we had about 100 itineraries. And 90 % of these ones, they were long ago. No itineraries in Europe. And in June of the same year, we redesigned the portfolio. We had 150 itineraries. And the new ones, they were all short haul. European, Mediterranean itineraries. So where it was possible to travel, basically, because of the travel bans.

20:34So it has been a very, very tough period, but I think we learned a lot. And also we became stronger as a team. And then different challenges when you scale up. And to me personally, I think it is the hardest and this growing number of people in the company. Because at the beginning, when you're a small team, you know, you understand each other immediately. Everyone is doing everything. Everyone is perfectly aligned. Everyone is in the same room. It's completely different. When you scale up, you start becoming more and more people. You have to onboard people from the outside. And these people, they didn't live the early days.

21:23so that maybe they don't understand immediately, they don't get immediately your peculiarities, your way of working, etc. And then when you start to go international, for example, you have to start again in finding the right people, finding new people and convince them to work for you because you are no one. And so it's not easy to find talents willing to join a company they don't know. So I think it's a very hard part to become international and find the right people. To me, this has been pretty tough. Yeah. There's always challenges on the startup journey, isn't there? Yeah. So on the flip side of that, what would you say have been some of the biggest highlights on the journey so far?

22:17Many. many. First of all, that's something very, I would say, emotional on customer-wise. We always had a very, very good score. We have surveys about the of credit trips, and we have always above nine in terms of the grade that we got, nine out of ten, the grade that we got from customers about the travel coordinators or the trip itself. That is very rewarding. But what is much more rewarding is what people are saying, are writing in the reviews. There are people that are saying, you changed my life. I met new friends. I was afraid to live with a bunch of strangers. It has been the best choice of my life, for example.

23:08I think this is very, that's not value. When I read every now and then, I keep reading the reviews and they kind of move me because you see the impact that you have on people. And then you have people that maybe they just write to you. Once we had a customer that replied to our newsletter saying, guys, you changed my life because I found the love of my life. I was thinking to be single forever because I wanted to stay single. And then I'm a different person. I'm in love. And they got married. So this kind of stuff, for me, is the best highlight, even if it's not business. I mean, and then other highlights on the business side, the fact that we kept growing, we survived the pandemic.

24:01That's unbelievable. Let's consider that in terms of our growth, the first, like the booster part, the first six months of our story, we had like, I guess, 250 customers. And then the year after, 2 ,500, so 10 ,000. And then the year after, 10 ,000. And then during the pandemic in 2021-2022, we say around 10 ,000 each year. And then we did 30 ,000, 60 ,000, and last year close to 100. And so seeing these numbers and seeing the number of people that are growing is impressive. Consider that we basically did, let's see, in one day, the whole revenue set we did in two years before in one entire year.

24:56So that's something that is very energizing. And the other part is seeing the highlights, is seeing the community of travel coordinators growing and growing internationally. These guys, the travel coordinators, they are now more than 3 ,000. When we started, we have like 10 people, friends and family, just to say the comparison. But they are growing in every market in Europe. So, for example, we do a global reunion event once per year where we put together all these people. We do celebration, workshop and parties for a couple of days on a weekend. And it's very rewarding seeing people from all over Europe, like celebrate people same age or people between 25 and 40 years old celebrating, staying together, mingling.

25:50And there's a lot of sub communities of these people. We have local chapters or we are like passion based kind of chapters. And so basically, again, about connection, we met these people connecting and traveling and meeting new people. That's for me the most important highlights. Yeah, I think coming back to your points of, I guess, seeing the impact that you've made on people's lives, of the experiences they've had and they've managed to, they found a partner that they've now got married to. I guess seeing all that come from an idea that you had years ago and seeing that come to fruition and seeing people's lives change must feel amazing.

26:35Yes, I think that's why I'm talking more about the people than the business itself. because I think we are lucky because we are in a business that on one hand is, of course, there's tech and read. We have many, many developers. We develop everything about our tech infrastructure, but it's not like the typical tech business or we are not a tech company under those terms, you know. So we are basically a company made of people. It's a business. made of people. So maybe in terms of, if you look for, I would say, business perspective, maybe we are not that interesting as a technology company. But if I look at another perspective, we can feel and touch the impact.

27:27When I say I'm lucky, I'm referring to the fact that we can see not just the number and the revenues growing, but seeing the stories of the people behind those numbers. I think that it's not many businesses. Businesses have this kind of possibility to touch the people like we are touching and see the results and get feedbacks. Again, we have a lot of feedbacks, a lot of people sharing pictures with us, a lot of people telling their stories about the fact that they met friends, partners, etc. Yeah, I think travel is also such a people-based activity. Absolutely. Yeah. So looking at your journey so far, what have been some of the lessons that you've learned?

28:13Okay, I think nothing completely new from what you are reading around. For example, fail fast. That's the difficult one. Over the years, we launched many, many, many projects. Some of them have been very successful. Other sucked completely. the point is not to be too attached to your idea or to your project so it's not working let it go for example in my previous experience I tried to start another company and it was a marketplace one of the side of the marketplace were doing very well the other one wasn't so I I was kind of stuck, but I was so attached to the idea that I wanted to make it work.

29:03But I turned away a lot of time and a lot of effort and investments, and it wasn't simply working. So it would have been better to recognize, this is not working. Let it go. So fail fast. Try it very many times and fail fast. Another point is keep room to the ideas that are coming bottom up. For example, I'm seeing the marketing team, and one of the things that I appreciate the most is the fact that people are having ideas, they are not self-censoring themselves, you see, and they are having ideas every day, every day, and they say, we could do that. What do you think about? Oh, let's do it. For example, I didn't put, or I'm still not putting any approval process, for example, for ideas.

29:57And I trust a lot of the team. That's another important lesson. Trust. If you trust someone, trust completely. Complete trust. Because this is unlocking a lot of potential, but that is also impressing a lot of speed in your business. If you have a team that you trust and you give them freedom, a lot of magic things are going to happen. If you are micromanaging the team, and I think that usually happens when you don't trust that much the people, it's not meant to end well. I mean, so my point is find the right people. That's another important lesson. And yes, I would say try to tackle any opportunity and even leave aside the ones that are completely nonsense, but look around.

30:58That's very important. And again, I would say, yes, empower people. I love that. I think that it's many times companies are slowing down because they have too many processes. They have too many approval layers, this kind of stuff. While if you give the freedom, then you can correct. If they do mistakes, you can correct afterwards. But at least you are not stopping, you're not preventing the creativity to happen. Yeah, definitely. So what is one lesson or piece of advice that you wish you would have known before transitioning to kind of the startup space? I would say for sure less thinking and more doing.

31:51I think there are many, many people that are blocked by paralysis, by analysis. Too many people that are always waiting for the right moment to do stuff. or to be prepared to launch a product. This is something that I learned when I met Paolo, my co-founder. I was a manager, so he was an entrepreneur. And I understood working with him and understood the other way the first time that we started working together before we rode, that his time to decision was impressive. I was accustomed to work on an environment that used to take like weeks to get a decision. Steering committee is a lot of, you know, balancing different opinions, different interests.