Connecting travelers with the best travel experiences

CaptainBook.io brings experience suppliers online by offering them a powerful yet simple booking engine connecting them to a network of local trusted resellers such as hotels, Airbnb hosts and travel agencies. Moreover, they facilitate tourists in searching and booking different local experiences. Their vision is to offer travelers unique local memories while helping small businesses generate more sales.

Hey Jerome, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. The purpose of this talk is to get to know you and CaptainBook better and to offer our investors the extra information they might want need about your business.

You have been in the entrepreneurial world for a few years now. Can you walk us through how these years have been for you?

Well, if you take into account the fact that I incorporated my first company when I was 20 years old, I’m almost able to say that I’ve been in the entrepreneurial world for half of my life. Exiting this first company enabled me to pay for my engineering school loan, and this is basically what I’ve been keeping doing for the last 15+ years. I create businesses and sell them a few years later for a profit.

I’ve been involved in a restaurant, a pastry shop, an IT consulting company, a pedagogy agency and a sailing tour company. All this during the last 15 years, while leaving in foreign countries (UK and Greece).

How did you come up with the idea of CaptainBook?

CaptainBook is really the continuity of the last 10 years of my life. After a couple of years of managing my sailing tours company, I decided to develop my own booking engine because existing solutions were not covering all my needs.

Luca (my co-founder) was working for his family-owned travel agency and it was really hard for us to communicate. He was calling me multiple times a day, and could never find tickets for his customers as I had to check before giving an answer, etc.

With the small MVP I developed back then, he could know my availabilities in real-time, book, and I could manage my whole business in one place. What a relief!

During Covid, I decided to rewrite the whole code base to make it able to manage any type of activity or experience. (That’s why historically, our first API version came to market even before our widgets turned anyone’s website into their own ticket shop)!

How cool! What about your co-founder, Luca? How did you two decide to work together?

When I arrived in Naxos back in 2011, I bought a business from Luca. We worked together at the start, so I was sure I would not do the same mistakes as he already did and could do my own mistakes to learn from.

We stayed friends over the years, debating about the world around us, from economy to tech, from politics to science.

When I decided to sell my sailing tour business to focus on CaptainBook.io it was clear to me that I had to jump on this adventure with my pal Luca. I explained the project to him, and he saw the value as he was actually using it already and said “boom!”. We incorporated the company and started to be really serious about the project.

I think the execution so far speaks for itself. We control 60% of the market in Naxos, and we already started to expand to other destinations such as Corfu, Italy, Crete, etc.

What problem do you want to solve with your solution and who is your client?

Small activity suppliers have a deadly need to be found online while there is no tool helping distribution partners (like hotels, Airbnb hosts, and travel agencies) to generate ancillary revenue from experiences.

Suppliers really need to digitise their products fast as Covid accelerated the trend where customers want to buy everything online.

We are the only solution connecting suppliers with a trusted distribution network while giving everything needed to create, manage, distribute and sell experiences.

Our typical client, in terms of who pays us, is a small experience supplier, making less than 250K euros per year in revenue, and is generally a family-owned business. They do not have the tech knowledge internally to sell online and need help to be known by local resellers (with no marketing budget).

What was the biggest challenge since you began on this project?

I think we faced 2 challenges so far:

- hiring in tech

We are fully remote and are quite attractive for engineers, but our tech stack (the technology we use for the platform) required particular knowledge. Turns out this knowledge is not widely available in Greece. Hopefully, it is abroad, so we have alternatives.

- fundraising

Because we are a pre-seed., small company, it’s hard to find funds. The Greek ecosystem is blooming, but still at its beginnings. We were too advanced for some acceleration programs, but not advanced enough to attract VC funds. This is exactly where SeedBlink fits by the way!

What is the feedback you get from your potential users?

We have a great relationship with our users and they are very happy to use us (more than 90% rated us 5/5 during our last survey). This is clearly the result of a long period of customer discovery and market discovery we run last year. I remember speaking with suppliers all the time, everywhere and anywhere!

This is still something we do by the way, I personally try to speak with our suppliers as often as possible to learn, while Luca is in contact daily with our distribution network.

Which part of the business do you think you need to work on more?

While we are very good at tech and marketing, I think our sales process can be improved. So far, it’s longer than we anticipated, and required more effort than we expected. We have ton of data to compute to extract learning for our expansion, so I’m quite confident.

Where do you see CaptainBook in 3-5 years from now?

3-5 years is a large scope but in 3 years, I see us big in Europe for sure (with a 730K+ euros EBITDA)! I won’t speak tech here as our research team is working on a bottom-up innovation I cannot disclose at the moment. CaptainBook will be powering most of the bookings from hotels, Airbnb and travel agencies in the EU, while the centralized way OTA operates at the moment will highly be challenged (by us of course, but by the market itself as well).

5 years is half of the gap between the experience market as compared to the accommodation market, meaning that in 5 years we can safely assume that 80%+ of the available experiences will be digitised, and, while experiences won’t be a commodity, this will open the way to market consolidation and new services.

At this time, CaptainBook will be in a very good position to take a profit from this market consolidation.

What makes CaptainBook a great investment for our investors?

CaptainBook is an amazing opportunity for investment as we have worked very hard to decrease the risk of our investors’ position:

- We are generating revenue

- We have been incredibly efficient on the acquisition on both sides of the marketplace

- We are a strong team of 9 people, including 3 amazingly experienced advisors

- We have felt the pain, on each side of the marketplace and work in tourism for more than 10 years

- This is not our first venture

And the list goes on! We already have quite a lot of Business Angels subscribed to this round, and I am very convinced that we are on the right path to success.

Learn more about this investment opportunity.