2000 to 2014 - ifyouski.com Stands the Test of Time

It's the ski season and if you are looking for a ski holiday you could do worse than check out www.ifyouski.com.  In fact, to be clear - I love this website!

It's so good to see her keep going, year after year.  Ifyouski.com was my first internet job.  I joined in August 2000 (shortly after they raised some money from VCs) and now, 13 seasons later, she's still shining.

Ifyouski nearly didn't survive.  It had c.£3m of investment and at one point we had about 50 staff. It imploded and was saved/bought by Online Travel Corporation in 2001 for a bargain (it's since been sold again a couple of times).  A handful of us kept our jobs.  I was one of them, together with Robin Wallace, Max De Grunwald, Rob Van Selm, Tim Barke, Susanne Hedges, Andy Hiseman, Tom Corcoran and Alan Whiteley.  Great team.

Ifyouski.com was a very useful website.  It still is.  It's a well structured fusion of holiday search with great decision support content (resort information, snow reports etc.)  So what happened to the £3m? Where did that go?

I was working in a Ski Tour Operator in 2000 and it was the height of the dot com boom.  I was excited by the chance to join an internet start up and whilst I didn't know much about startups or the internet, I knew a lot about selling and organising ski holidays.  I saw an ad, thought "Yup - that'd suit me" and I joined in a role which would these days be called Product Manager.  Back then such job titles didn't exist.

7 years earlier (1993) ex-Olympian skier, Michael Liebreich published a book on ski technique called The Complete Skier. A few years later he took it online as complete-skier.com.  It had ski technique content, resort information, snow reports, ski news.  It was just stacked full of great ski related content.  On top of this a ski chalet holiday search was added as a way of generating some revenue.

As it turns out, a ski chalet holiday search in 1999 was a very useful tool indeed.  It still is.  The British ski chalet business is fragmented with many small independent operators.  In those days, if you were looking for a chalet (say) for 8 people in a specific resort for a specific date from a specific airport you'd have to phone many different operators having read the ads in the Sunday Times travel supplement.  To have a website where all of the main operators were listed was fantastic because you could search across many operators at the same time.  When you'd found your ideal holiday you could phone the booking office (our travel agent partner) or make an email enquiry.  The travel agent made a commission on the booking which they shared with us.

Nice business model.  Going strong today.

What happened in 2000 was the company looked to build on it's early success in ski by raising money to launch new sites leveraging the same technology platform.  Instead of just ski, the plan was to open up into adventure travel (ifyouexplore), golf (ifyougolf) and scuba diving (ifyoudive).  And as well as doing this in the UK, we intended to launch in 3 other countries.  Instead of 1 market in 1 country we went head first into 4 markets in 4 countries.  Instead of nuturing 1 business model that worked, we developed 1 that worked and attempted to launch another 15 that we didn't know whether they would work or not. 

This was an expensive bet to make.  Expensive as we had about 50 people (although about 20 of them were interns).  In 2000, tech development was costly (we used an agency) and almost everything was proprietary.  We had to buy our own servers, write code from scratch (very few open source libraies existed) and create our own content.  We didn't know about lean startup methodology.

As it turns out the international businesses and the non-ski businesses didn't deliver a revenue stream fast enough.   Some parts of the ski business model simply did not transfer across borders or sectors.

The cash burn was crazy. Back in the dot com boom maybe this didn't seem so crazy.  However, unable to deliver the revenues, we were not able to raise further funding and the business was sold. 

All that remains now is the one business model that worked; selling ski holidays in the UK via a travel agent using online search.

The lesson I took away from that experience was that any new business model that a company attempts needs to be validated before putting too much investment into it.  Validation of the business model requires really understanding the customer segment(s), the distribution channels, the customer relationship methods, the proposition, the key activities and resources, who the key partners are, the cost base and the revenue model.

An excellent way to map this out is using a business model canvas.  A business model canvas allows you to capture on one page all of the above points.  You can highlight the parts of the canvas that you understand (the "knowns") and the parts you yet need to prove (the "known unknowns").  You can think about the assumptions you are making and then think about how you can go about testing those assumptions.  You then systematically run those tests and tweak the model based on the feedback. Once you really have proven all elements of the canvas to a reasonable degree of certainty, you're in a position to start investing money in developing this business model.  

I was lucky enough to work with some really great people at ifyouski.com.  Many remain true friends.  We had a real adventure and managed to leave a legacy which still keeps going today. 

The good news is for entrepreneurs today, lean start-up methods have made it easier to validate business models sooner.  More tools and platforms exist to support new initiatives and there's a growing workforce of talented designers, developers and marketing folks to call on. 

What Makes A Start-Up Worth Investing In?

I saw in Wired magazine this month a short article about a company that had received VC funding via Seedcamp. One of the founding shareholders in Seedcamp is Robin Klein.

What I found very useful was a short list of checkpoints given by Robin on what he seeks in a start-up.

I've listed it here because I think it makes so much sense...

1. A team excited about what they're trying to achieve

2. A big vision with understanding of the issues involved in achieving it

3. A team that's already achieved a lot with very little

4. A differentiated product or service that meets a need

5. A project with global reach addressing a large market

There's one other point I would add for good measure; a business that can scale. By scale, I mean a business that will see exponentially increasing returns on the assets deployed as it grows.

Conclusion? If you are going to invest your heart and soul into a start up or join a start up team, make sure the answers to the above points are all "yes!"

Time will always tell course.

To the dealer, "I've made my bet and I'm sticking, thanks. I think I've been dealt a great hand".

Nine And A Half Weeks, Nine And Half Million Pounds

Today the news hot off the press is that Livebookings* has raised $16m / £9.5m in VC funding thanks to an investment into the company by Wellington Partners.

You can read the full story here.

(* Livebookings is Europe’s largest online marketing and reservations service for the restaurant industry. We help restaurants fill their tables by delivering customers through a free online booking service and network of high-profile partner websites. I say "we" because they’re my employer, too.)

For me personally I can reflect on a summer that was dominated by the fund-raising round and the due diligence process that followed. I feel very lucky to have been involved. I met many VCs myself and the process helped us really refine our business plan, check, double-check and re-check the assumptions and think carefully about our long term strategy. We’ve also received some great input on how to improve our business operations.

Raising capital in the summer months is always more tricky as so many people are away, and doing so in a recession at break-neck speed is an extra challenge. However, it does have the added benefit that we now have a solid foundation of a three year plan in place and so preparing a detailed operational budget for 2010 will be easier.


So, what did I learn from the summer of fundraising?

1. Ask for help to refine the pitch

The pitch we made was rehearsed several times with existing investors who had a feel for what a future investor would need to know. What are the key assumptions that need to stand up for the investor to buy into the growth plan? Address these issues face on.

2. Keep it simple

If we’re not careful, our business can come across as complicated. We really had to focus on making it straightforward as possible to explain the “what”, “why”, “how” and “when”. Using visual aids in presentations is vital to convey meaning, and being able to visualise concepts with pictures is essential.

3. Build and test a very detailed supporting business plan

The business plan that our team prepared was very thorough with lots and lots of assumptions building up a very thorough view of the business over the next few years. It was a collaborative effort and took weeks to nail down. I noticed that what was important here was not to just create the plan, but to be able to talk around some of the key ratios such as cost-of sale, revenue per unit, marketing efficiency and traffic source, share and conversion. Knowing these numbers is the core of the pitch.

4. Prioritise the fundraising process but protect key people

In a fundraising round, you have to be prepared to drop everything to answer investor questions, travel to a pitch, answer follow up questions and provide supplementary data. It means dropping everything else, so you need a part of the team that are focused on running the day to day business so it doesn’t grind to a halt.

5. Show your passion

People buy people and if you’re not excited about your business, how will someone else be? Enthusiasm is contagious, so show the world what makes you tick and why your business is exciting. If it’s not exciting, what are you pitching for?

6. Enjoy the ride

Despite the hard work involved, I really enjoyed the process. I will be the first to hold my hand up and say that there are others on the team who were much more involved than me, but when I did participate I looked forward to the investor meetings. It was a privilege to meet smart people who could think about your business from different angles and help you refine your approach every time. It was a great experience and I was very happy to be involved.


If you’re out there raising money for your business right now, I wish you all the best, and every success.