On November 25 2014, the 14th MCEI Founder Talk with the title “Bootstrapping a multimillion Euro Startup in just 8 Months” was held at the Fuchs-Petrolub-Festsaal. Bastian Böckenhüser, founder of „travelcircus“ and Nils Brosch (Head of Operations) shared their experiences with buildung a bootstrapped company and presented valuable learnings.
travelcircus is a Berlin-based start-up that is offering high-class hotel stays combined with events at reduced rates. Their special offering model, the combination of two reduced prices, allows them solve a major problem of the touristic industry: filling the unused room capacities of a hotel. By combining discounted services, they manage to work with premium hotels without diminishing their brand value.
The presentation started with an account of the business model. Bastian and Nils did not only describe their activites and plans in great detail, but also answered numerous question in a sincere manner. After that, Bastian retraced his learning path with stations at Groupon and myDriver and drew valuable learnings from it. According to him, each entrepreneur should try to achieve a simple "proof of concept" before focussing on an idea: „just create a simple wordpress page for the company and run some Google AdWords for it!" He undermined this advice with very entertaining stories about some of his own trial companies, which he finally abbandoned to focus on travelcircus.
Furthermore, Bastian and Nils recommend to focus on affiliate marketing in early stages and avoid Google AdWord campaigns. Concerning recruiting, they adivse to only employ people who are desperately need. travelcircus managed have an excellent process infrastructure built by great interns (inter alia from the University of Mannheim) instead of hiring experienced managers for that.
After the entertaining lecture, the evening with a get-together at L3 Coffee Lounge, which was sponsored by travelcircus. It was a great conclusion, especially because Bastian and Nils stayed for a long time to chat will the participants and answer all remaining questions. Thanks to our guests for a great event!
