MOTOURISMO, Escape from Covid Hell.
These guys have brought you your freedom.
Ride on.
“There’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark out, and we’re wearing sunglasses,”
“Hit it.”[1]
MOTOURISMO is the leading international marketplace for the motorcycle tourism industry.[2] Its business is booming in Europe and it plans to scale in the US with the easing of pandemic related travel restrictions. I interviewed co-founders Michael Carlin and Christoph Kähler at this three-year old, Hamburg-based startup that has survived the tourism meltdown. In the fateful year prior to the global shutdown, MOTOURISMO was selected Startup of the Year and awarded Best Travel Technology in Germany. As the world emerges from the dark shadows of the pandemic, the message for adventurers is now clear. It is time to ride.
I asked Michael and Christoph what theme song they would choose for their startup.
“Rawhide, from the Blues Brothers. It was the only song they could perform at the roadhouse while the audience was throwing beer bottles.
We have had so many partners who have had their doubts. Since we are based in Germany, we are very good at finding reasons why things will not work. A German engineer would never go for an MVP (Minimal Viable Product). We don’t have a culture of just flying by the seat of our pants. I guess that is why I thought of the Blues Brothers sitting in their car, totally unprepared but going for it.”
These guys are prepared and did much better than expected given the conditions that have decimated others in the travel industry. In a market where the typical travel facilitators were down 90%, MOTOURISMO’s bookings were up 50% year over year prior to the winter second shutdown. The German Travel Industry Club (TIR) commended MOTOURISMO’s leading web technology, industry knowledge, and personal advisory for yielding customer and partner loyalty.
“The numbers support the theory that people want to get out. In 2020, people booked anything still available according to the pandemic’s intense travel restrictions... Portugal... Northern Italy, Germany’s Black Forest. Bookings were up but revenues were lower because people could not take the high value packages they wanted to take to distant locations in New Zealand, South Africa, and the US.
Travel was f*cked. We tripled our prior monthly sales up through the summer of 2020. Great KPIs. Luckily, the German government launched a huge investment in several markets to get through the crisis minimizing job loss. We cut costs everywhere.
It is a huge challenge to survive as a startup. On the other hand, there is a huge upside to being so small. We operate a very lean company.”
MOTOURISMO is a one-stop platform that alleviates the frustration 170 million motorbike tourists face in every aspect of their trip planning on the demand side, while enabling discoverability and booking management for vendors supplying those experiences.
Michael, a former journalist for Financial Times Deutschland (FTD), experienced this pain point himself. He discovered what a hyper-fragmented market it is for operators and how it is a source of frustration and confusion for customers. Michael approached Christoph, his colleague at Gruner + Jahr (G+J, co-publisher of the FT German edition) with the idea of marketing a solution.
Christoph learned digital marketing from scratch in his ten years in business administration at G+J. He gained experience in financial planning and marketing for a portfolio of G+J’s largest publications. When Michael approached, Christoph already had the startup bug. He wanted to do something on his own but never had the right idea. Christoph looked at Michael’s proposal from his perspective. He analyzed the market, competitive offerings, booking value, Internet search volumes, etc. Within a half a day, Christoph drafted a raw business plan to see if the concept could actually fly. He believed it could. Their colleague Malte Meiboom, a full-stack developer, joined them. MOTOURISMO arose to serve a €43 billion under-digitized market opportunity.
Christoph is the numbers guy, Michael is the digital product development guy, and Malte executes the technical needs.
“I was looking for the product I was missing as a motorcyclist. We didn’t have to invent anything new. We just had to adapt existing models to our specific mass market. It is not the demand side that lacks the understanding of the need. It is the supply side that lacks the understanding of how to meet the need.”
Please tell me about your process from ideation to launch. What challenges and frustrations did you face?
“The first big challenge was deciding between features and marketplace investment in the test phase. It took six months of customer validation before we had the ability to choose dates as a key offered feature. That was very painful.
We decided to use the development money for content creation rather than for additional features to accelerate organic rankings. It is a constant balance of developing product versus developing traffic with limited funds. The choice depended on the way we integrated vendors and visitors. It was a time and thought consuming process in the beginning months.
Michael has a very hands-on approach in the learning process dealing with the motorcycle industry. He does it from the inside. Michael goes on site to meet operators, attends all the trade fairs, and makes many phone calls to potential partners. At the beginning, the vendors responded: Let me see it and maybe I’ll join.
We had to put together an MVP very quickly without all the features we wanted. We were paying for everything out of our own pockets. We came up with a working and functioning click dummy with basic features. We were able to convince the vendors to join. There would be no cost to them. We offered to integrate all their content for free. They did not have much reason to say no.
We addressed the demand side with a little social media and a bit of paid search once the basic portfolio with operators was confirmed on the platform. We learned what we needed to satisfy demands. We addressed those operators directly. We have developed in an agile way with an ear to the market listening very carefully to what customers want and offering that.
We have done a good job of satisfying customers and operators. We brought operators a growing number of customers from the start. We were able to grow the business with more trust from each. We now have 100 operators on our platform that we have vetted ourselves.”
Please tell me about a mistake or failure you have addressed.
“We thought that we could open the marketplace as a SaaS concept by allowing operators to post their own offers on our marketplace. There was no way to imagine that this would be an issue. Some operators would ask to do this themselves. They posted what they thought was right, but it was substandard. It was way more work to fix it than if we had just done it on our own.
In German, we say ‘landing on our nose’. This was a valuable mistake because we learned one of the opportunities for creating value for our product is not only to do marketing and customer service, but also serious Q&A. You can only do that if you have a deep understanding of the product, the market, and the customer. We do.
We learned that the local operators do not have the ability to do the marketing and booking service we offer. The operators who are our partners today still function in traditional, tech-limited ways. They are not digital natives. They have us for that.”
What are your plans for the year ahead?
“Very few partners told us to wait until we survived the crisis. They all told us to prepare for a boom in travel anticipated the following year. In the US alone, 2020 sales for motorcycles were up 40-50% year over year according to the Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC).
There is a huge potential for offering opportunities to motorcyclists without spending huge amounts of money. There is no end in finding operators with expertise in their region, which is how we have built the business from the start.
We are feeling a strong come back already, not just for domestic and mid-range travel as an alternative to long distance travel. Customers are already booking long distance travel for 2022.”
How are you facing off the competition?
“There are limited marketplace competitors out there. We know that they are behind us in many respects, particularly in terms of customer success. They have a much smaller portfolio of options. We have almost 4,000 bookable motorcycle package tours, training courses, and motorcycle shipping options. Some of our competitors are set up as purely technical booking platforms without specific expertise in the motorcycle market or knowledge of the motorcycle community.
That’s the reason why we see our concept as a booking platform and online travel agency combined. We offer a level of understanding, guidance, and support our competitors do not. Our industry and marketing expertise combined with our digital technology creates a unique value for our customers and operating partners. We hear over again from our customers, ‘I have been looking for this for at least ten years.’”
What is your greatest achievement so far?
“Managing the marketplace we are creating. We grew 200% year over year last year before the second shutdown. We provide tours in 50 countries. Our goal is to expand our booking options from just under 4,000 to 30,000-50,000.
We are building for a community that we know ourselves.”
MOTOURISMO has just closed on a €1 million Euro seed funding round this month from business angels originating in the US, Israel, and Europe. Investors include partners such as the Dutch motorcycle apparel manufacturer REV’IT! and the US motorcycle community ADVrider.
“We learned that never giving up is key no matter how dark it might get. The last one and a half years were no fun at all. We have been on edge constantly. What we need to do now is get back to the level of early 2020. Luckily, we can already see that happening. So looking back, it’s hard to believe we really survived the rough ride through the pandemic. By that, we have been able to prove that amount of resilience. Looking ahead, the restart feels like we are kicking off something even bigger and better than we would have imagined in the first place.”
Get ready for a good ride.
Joy Fairbanks evaluates early stage startups, advises founders, and creates programming for startup accelerators globally. She writes about startup success at FairbanksVentureAdvisors.com.
[1] Interchange between Elwood and Jake, The Blues Brothers. Universal Studios, 1980.
[2] MOTOURISMO’s primary marketplace consists of domestic and international motorcycle trips for European customers and is rapidly expanding its international base of clients as well.