#39 - Fabio Bin on building WeRoad: €130M revenue, 300k travellers, and the power of community-led growth

My guest today is Fabio Bin, co-founder and CMO of WeRoad. One of Europe's fastest growing travel startups redefining group travel solo travellers. Founded in 2017, WeRoad has now served over 300,000 travellers, raised over 36 million euro and surpassed 100 million euro revenue in 2024. In this episode we talk about building a community driven brand, turning customers into ambassadors, scaling organically through creativity and data, and the real lessons that Fabio has had from building a 100 million euro revenue business. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Fabio, thank you for making the time to come on and chat. I'm excited to speak with you. I think you might be the first Italian founder or Italian based founder I've ever had on the podcast. You can claim that title straight away. Well, very happy about that. Even because you know, Italian lessons startup ecosystem is not that developed yet, so I'm very happy to be here presenting here. No, 100%. Thank you very much for coming on and like, let's go straight into it, straight into the deep end if we can, if we can. And I want to talk about WeRoad. Now, you're one of the co-founders, you've built it from the ground up. Just tell us how the idea came about and what the journey was to kind of, I guess, launching the company right at the very, very start. Yeah, the idea was very simple. At the beginning, my business partner and I considered he is a student to pruneer. Why I was like just a builder, like to say that, kind of a builder. And the idea was to find a solution for people looking for friends to travel with because the problem is people in their 30s and 40s and you know, it's not that easy to make new friends like when you are in the uni, for example. So for example, there are people that are engaged, some are married or they just move to a new city. So, relationships are tough. And when it comes to your audience, your vacation, it sometimes happens also that you want to to explore the world in a different way from people that you already know, if you know someone. So the idea was let's try to create a kind of a platform or system to allow people to meet fellow brothers. That was the original idea. And what has been kind of a different, I guess it was targeting a specific demographic that like back eight years ago, where millennials went in their full 30s. So I mean people 30s old, your professional, good disposable income that no fellow travelers travel with. So it was just like this. And we didn't want to be like an OTA or something. That is the word is kind of a red ocean, the travel industry if you think about that. That's why we focus on the age and the fact to bring people together. In fact, sorry, I didn't mention that we do organize trips for people that who don't know each other. So in this more group of people, 8 to 15, long old trips. So for example, our original best sellers are being Indonesia, Peru, Cuba, this kind of destination where maybe you don't want to travel solo. But you are forced to live solo and you need fellow companions. So that was the idea pretty easy. And we started just with a believe eight destinations, eight itineraries. Now we are more than 1000. And that's it. Yeah. So you started off with the eight and you started testing that. And one of the things that fascinated me when I was researching we wrote from a proposition perspective was not only the aged based community for travel, but also the mood based travel as well. Tell us more about that. How do you go about categorizing that? Yeah, it's always a simple intuition. We knew our friends. We knew that some of our friends were like more party guys or some other more into nature and tracking and hiking. And this world are not necessarily so far, but some time they are far. So the idea was like, okay, let's try to offer kind of another view of the mode of the trip. So we are not only promising that you are going to travel with some people your age. That's a generational belonging is is per mount in our model. But also with the same mode. If you're more into the party, you probably go to Thailand and to take an itinerary like we call a beach life is Thailand Beach Life. And you're going to have fun and you know what you're buying. But if you are going for example, on I don't know Iceland tracking and you stay a day doing tracking on a tent. It's a completely different experience. So these modes are completely different. But I have to say that the majority of our trips are quite balanced. They are like a component which is like adventure, a component which is like history and city and culture and also party because there are people in their 30s and 40s. So still that party is relevant. So the idea is as a customer you can opt for the group but also the mode of the trip. The idea is we want you to enjoy the trip. We want you to enjoy the destination. And of course if you've traveled in companions, if they are in the same mode as you, that would be much easier. So it's not important about the background because we are people that are coming from developers, consultants, healthcare personnel, whatever. And they are all our customers. But the point is I want to travel with people that are the same generation of background. We used to sing the same songs when we were teenagers or watching the same movies when we were teenagers. At this time if I'm an early person I want to do tracking. I want to say with people that do tracking. It's kind of a let's say a fitter that the group must have to be a successful enjoyable trip. For sure. And how did you start by testing this? Because you're asking people to travel in a community with other people that they have absolutely no idea. They might get information on a little bit of background or geography or some sort of kind of overview. But at the end of the day you're asking people to go to another part of the world that they've not been to before with people that they don't know and basically trust that we wrote as a product and as a platform has done a good job of matching that. How do you start testing that? I appreciate now it's way more advanced in how you pair them and build out these trips. But right at the very beginning I'm intrigued as to how did you validate that people wanted to do this? I think it's been like we kind of found ourselves in the right moment. It was like a kind of a cross paths between generations again. People in their 30s who were disposable income and no friends with other routes. And at the same time we were we were being we are being supposed to be strong growth on Instagram. So in 2017 Instagram was a square rocketing 2018 was super and we understood that we had to communicate with these people using the channel the new the best and the use the most at that time. That's why for example on Instagram we never communicate like in a sesu way. Actually I would say the first year we probably we mentioned we wrote this stuff as a brand that very very little and we were more about the passion of millennial or the problems. I don't know struggling with I have to pay the cost of the rent or I did like three dates in a row and they all went wrong or this kind of stuff or I want to say for to visit this destination or again showing people already doing these kind of activities to show in them that is not impossible to I don't know to to to go to the other side of the world on a zipline and meeting strangers. So we did we use a lot of communication our pop communication I mean like memes now everyone is using memes in the social communication at that time they weren't that many companies doing so. So we have been very inspirational on one end on the other hand we were being very very fun and as Martha will say and we decided to communicate with them using the same channel they were using on daily life. So 2017 we were communicating with our prospect through the Amazon Instagram or WhatsApp. Again, now it's normal. Now it's pretty normal. But that time, we used to have like, you know, the phone with sticker on it say like Instagram inbound Instagram inbound organic Instagram paid campaign, you know, discounted stuff. But at that time, we're answering to them one by one on a very putting ourselves at the same level as the customer. Even now, the time was even stronger because for example, if a customer drops you a like a vocal note, what do you do? You have to to to reply back with the recording. You can not just send a text, you know, so it was kind of building the trust this way. On the website part, we have to say that that's a kind of a trick in a way since we were at the beginning, the project was completely booster up there. We went online with the website in a couple months, in the first itinerary, we had 80th inari again in a couple months. But I built this, the website, I'm very proud of that. Like it was like a super established company. So the idea was the idea was, okay, I want to position this brand like not like a brand, a travel brand. I want to position this brand like a brand for millennial, like Spotify, like Netflix, whatever. So a big different colors compared to the travel industry, classic, let's say, know that the blue, the sky, know that there are orange or the sun, the sunset, this kind of stuff. We went for red and black, very different. We took inspiration from other companies like, hopefully from from from from companies that they're in their sector, they were kind of disruptors in terms of marketing. But at the same time, we certainly in the website, a lot of details, a lot of FAQs in terms of how is going to work the moods, like the travel moods for every travel page where the travel moods are the specific tool. So we kind of debuted in the market as an established company in a way, why we were just like a boost up company. Yeah, I love it. Okay. And in those earliest days, you know, was it you're doing everything, right? In terms of you're the one organizing the trips, you're the one leasing with all of the, you know, the hotels, the airlines, the customers themselves, you're all pulling all of this together. You know, were there any times where any trips went really wrong? Or what were the biggest learnings, I guess, in the very early days when you were building out the product? Oh, no. Lucky us, we didn't have real problems, I had to say, but at the beginning, as you mentioned, we were asked doing basically everything, doing the bookings, and there is shout-out to the hotels, all this stuff is speaking with the customers. But you know what, I believe that it's not that difficult to design an operator as a, you can, especially your number, as most numbers, it's like organizing a trip for friends. That was my business partner, my co-founder, was very good at organizing trips for his friends. And so basically, he brought his skills into that. It was super easy. The difficulty is now that we are now 300,000 customers that are with us, it's completely different scale, completely different game, but that that day was very easy. And consider since our trips are led by, we have also sorry, I didn't mention before, but there's another peculiarity in the model. Our trips are not led by local travel guides, they are led by travel coordinators. For us, travel coordinators are, it's a peculiar role. Again, it's not that travel, a professional travel guide is not just a traveler, it's a passionate traveler acting as a travel buddy for the group. Leaving from the original country, so it's not staying in Thailand, it's leaving from, your department from France is a French guy with a French group of people, but he's a person, same age, same generation again, that is gonna explore the destination along with the group. So, it's taking care of the operational parts, like for example, I don't know, doing the check-ins, or is the person that the last person going to sleep after the last year, a nine, the first one getting up in the morning for connecting transfer, all this stuff, but the same time, it's part of the group. So it's exploring the destination along with the group. And the idea about this role, it canes because when we travel, my business partner and I, we travel with other companies, similar companies, we had the feeling that the travel guide, the local travel guide, they were doing that tour for like one hundred times. So they're very good at doing their role, but the same time, they were in part of the group. And we wanted having a person as a part of the group. So we recruit these people and the first people that they recruit, it was like just France and family. I get we had 10 of them in the first month. Now they are 4000 across Europe, and they're basically leading our tours as part of the group. Yeah, it's incredible. And now you've scaled to 300,000 travelers kind of moving with you, you know, over 100 million Euro revenue. Like how do you, the very early days when you were really, really close to the customers, really close to the travelers, really close to the community? How did that change as the business scaled? And how did you ensure that actually you managed to keep that kind of magic and that identity, you know, now at the size of organization that you're at? I believe this is the ultimate question because it's something that that's very resonates with me because I'm probably the one in the company. One of the person more worried about the growth of the company in terms of what it can become in the future. You know, when you're as more group of people running a company, everything is difficult, but it's extremely rewarding because it's true. Everyone is doing everything. Yeah, but you have a kind of a mental connection. You don't need to talk. You don't need to say the word because everyone is understanding exactly what's going on. So it's difficult, but it's very rewarding. And you know, every new customer is kind of a super success. We used to have like, as a gift that I made to do part of the team just a bell. You know the bell for the hotel? Every time that we got a new customer was ringing a bell thing, it was like, it's a, I'm a kind of romantic have to say, because I know that that feeling is gone. And so you have to prepare yourself for a different stage and we already went through many different stages. We all even went through the pandemic and we survived. So I think that the secret is tried to lead by example and reminding every day, especially to the new joiners, the relevance of the cultural because you know, when there are new joiners, especially coming from I would say more professional background scale ups and maybe they didn't have this period of the startup, the daily stage startup is always a bit difficult to explain how important the customer experience that goes beyond numbers. If you look at the CSAT, if you look at the NPS, it's okay, it's fine. If you look, we are very happy with our quality. For example, we don't want our quality of the trip is going under nine. We are very, very high quality, nine out of ten, I mean. But at the same time, that number is just a number. And I always remind people to go beyond the number, to read the quality reviews that they leave us. And if we make some mistakes to fix the mistakes, to call the customer, for example, why something goes wrong and our customer care, call each customer one by one on the phone, try to understand what we did wrong, how can fix the problem, how to keep the customer happy. And I knew that it's very, it's kind of activity that takes effort and apparently it gets no results. Because if you look from a, like, just a number approach, it doesn't seem to have a real value. But if you look at the customer happiness, I would say it has a lot of value. Consider that one third of our customer, they, of new customer, they came by world amount. Okay, so let's consider how important he is having a satisfied customer and fix a problem when something goes wrong. To me, it's paramount, like the care for detail, I'm a detail obsessed. I know that I have to kind of give up some time. But in the end, I don't think I'm to be wrong in putting attention on details. Because I think it's what separates a successful company from everyone else. So it's just the customer session to me. And to be honest, it's difficult. It's difficult as much you scale, is even tougher and more difficult to have the same feeling, the same approach in all the people in the organization. So to me, the secret is try to lead by example and show to the people in the company how much you care. And try care about the company, about the customers. And it's not only about the world amount and customer is that even from my personal customer perspective, I don't want to be the company that is not up to the light people. I want to be the company that the light people every day, that's the point. Yeah, 100%. I agree with that. And one of the points you raised just then, a third of all new customers coming from word of mouth. Let's just change it up a little bit and talk about growth and acquisition, especially from a marketing perspective. How has the acquisition of customers changed as the business has matured? I can imagine that you didn't start with one third of customers coming from word of mouth. And I also want to ask what was from an acquisition perspective, what worked really well before COVID, that now either doesn't work or you had to change kind of strategy post COVID? I would say we always had this kind of a, sorry, first of all, we have the, all the marketing team which is in house. And to be honest, the majority of the company has built everything in house. So technology is now the Java coordinator are reported with an internal team, Java design has been done in house. That's very important for the speed in terms of execution, but also in terms of adjusting when you take out the wrong path. Of course, it's much easier when you have more and then this size. So we have to be more careful even when taking risk. And then, why is it we have been always balanced between the organic growth and the paid growth. So as mentioned before, we started in a very good moment for leverage the social media and specifically Instagram. And so we treat the first step as being considering Instagram as a, like not as a channel belong into a brand, but as a kind of a publisher, kind of a magazine, regards to the fact that it belongs to a brand. So no pressure for selling, no obsession for brand guidelines. Absolutely not. Let's treat it like whatever page on Instagram talking about trips, millennial and passion about millennials. But of course, so organic growth went very well, I have to say, that's the first answer. Till the pandemic, the growth on social has been completely organic and was doing very, very well. And I believe that after the pandemic, but it's not related to pandemic, it's related to Instagram, and to the competition that we have now. It's much more difficult to grow the same speed as before in terms of Instagram. Growing is not just about the the follower base, which I don't believe is a matrix, but a way, because that is that Instagram is always being part of our marketing funnel. But having engaged customers looking at the format and the content that we are doing with an obsession like a publisher, it made a total difference compared to companies that are just doing advertising. So then we paired this with the, of course, investment on social media, even using the format that we are using in our organically. And it changed the mix for sure of the social component versus, for example, the paid searcher. Now, the searcher is pretty big compared to before. Of course, we are much more keen on a matrix. Before the pandemic, but it was our third year in a row in business, I mean, two years, plus the pandemic. I mean, we were more focused on easy metric like the CAC, the cost of acquisition. So, you know, kind of a garbage, you can garbage out and pretty easy. The CAC is doing well. I can push more, I can do more content and testing more. Now we are more focused on the matrix. We now are using a marketing, marketing model to better understand the location across channel. Then, of course, Tik Tok came around. So we have more channel. We start as an Instagram, paid in the organic and paid. Now we have many, many channels. We introduced offline, which is a key component of our marketing mix. But what is truly changed is the approach, which is much more econometric now, much more, does much more accountability now. And because the scale of the investment on paid is completely different. And because I can tell you that it didn't change is the approach to the offline channels. We started as a, with very little money. And so this basically forced us to be creative, to be really, really creative. And we understood that is not the power, the money you put on the table is much more the power of the idea to hack the system. It's we start buying last minute out of one deal. Like it was just, we start calling the sales houses, the pro and the media providers. And telling them we are as most at up, we don't have any money. If we are like free spaces, empty spaces, free is let us know, we will find a solution. And we start buying this way. And we understood that to fulfill the creative in a very short time, we had to come up, we are really strong creative idea. And this led us to even to push further our positioning. We always been inspirational and fun at the same time. And pretty bold as something even controversial. But this forced to be very creative in 24 hour to deliver a creative for out of one campaign. We came up with punchy headlines. So just a black canvas with white copy, white headline, very, very simple, but super punchy. And we got covered with a cover on LinkedIn, we got cover on press. And this led us to have a very, very established brand to reach out to us to ask him to collaborate. So they so creative in us. And that was amazing. Super, super scale ups, super established brand. They went to us in 2018 because they wanted to partner with us. And it didn't work before, before doing this kind of campaigns, we were knocking to the doors and getting a answer. When we start to showcase our creative power, let's say, with just a few billboards and very strong ideas, we start to get noticed by customers, but also by the B2B and other stakeholders. And then this approach, we brought it also on other activities, not just billboards, but whatever marketing stands, we do at least one marketing stand per each marketing per month. Because we have this idea, we call it the strategy drop and repeat. Actually, I borrowed from the founder of Brudog that wrote in his book Business for Pants was the idea. You have to drop the bomb, load a repeat, drop load repeat. If you do it, In a frequent manner, with a very recognizable way of doing, you start building a brand. And it doesn't cost as much as people imagine. The people mentioned that doing a offline is very costly, is very expensive. It depends how you plan. For example, we unpick the ad space, we choose the network, and we work a lot on the creative part. And trust me, something that can cost very, very little money can have a big, big result in terms of PR, visibility, buzz, ritual LinkedIn, or ritual social, whatever. It didn't change. It's interesting. How do you stay so close to the community when trips are arguably, relatively infrequent? Someone might take one, maybe two, maybe up to three max, big holidays a year. How do you stay close to the community over a long period of time when maybe someone is saving up to go on a trip? The marketing touch points there are far more around that brand recognition and their relationship with we write, rather than their relationship with the specific geography or trip they're going to go on. Absolutely. You're right. It's not about the destination. In fact, we understood, and we often say that the destination, yes, we do cell trips, because it's what we sell. The actual need that we fulfill is the connection between people. So what happened? I tell you how we keep people engaged. Before the beginning, we were no one. So to get the people to know us, we started realizing small gatherings around drinks, like beer, just to present the model. So we put in in our main city, which at the time was Milan, we started with organizing these gatherings inviting people to get to know the model. We started with the travel coordinators, speaking about not speaking, they were drinking, you could ask them about the destination, etc. We understood that people were showing up, bringing people that already travel with us, they're showing up, bringing you and your friends. So we understood that the real need wasn't to understand about the road. It was an occasion to meet to know you people. And spontaneously, travel coordinators that are self-organized in local chapters in local cities, they start to self-organize other activities like, I don't know, I can't parties or I don't know game puzzle game nights, this kind of stuff. And at that point, we understood that it was very important for us to get a bit of control and consistency about this events. So we came up last year, we launched, but we formally was already existing. Last year we launched this app called we meet as an application where you can, it's basically available in 40, 40 cities across Europe, where you can meet people, for example, to about dinner with stranger or to do like a yoga session or running session or doing, I don't know, it depends on where you are, you can also go just go to the museum or to go to do kayaking, whatever. And it's working pretty well. The people that are our traveler, they are using this happen to meet other people in their cities. So the point is, we are covering and we are in touch with them, not only when they're traveling, but also when they stay in the city. In fact, many of our partnership, we do partnership with other brands, providing discounts or benefits, say, both for when they are traveling, for example, this counts on flights or when they are staying in the cities like this count to go to the GM or for mobility sharing. And it is being present in their life as much as possible. Plus, we tend to do, when I mentioned the offline before, we tend to do many activities in the city like sponsoring like a key venue in, in every city where we can have a, we can be sponsor, but at the same time, organized event organizer. The point is, is, is barely impossible, almost impossible to avoid we wrote in, in one city that we are targeting, even when we are not traveling. And how, again, going back to this community piece, you mentioned earlier, around 30 year olds, like millennials, that being the kind of real kind of key demographic. As you've now, you know, operated, I mean, what business is, what, two years time, or one year time, it'll be almost 10 years old, currently if I'm wrong, right. How have you seen this generation move and shift now their travel patterns, and now the generation that's coming in behind them, how are you marketing differently, if at all, to that customer base. It's a very good question, actually, it's something that we are actually debating this is because on one end, our core target is 30 years old. So, we are seeing basically these people growing up in a way. We also seeing changes in life, for example, 80% of our travel are singles, okay. But then maybe they found us out in a couple again, and they give up traveling, some of them, some of them, some other, they travel with their partner. For example, the ones that they stopped traveling when they are in a relationship, then they came back because you know, relationships are not lasting longer anymore these days. And so, it's kind of the guarantee for us to get customers. Yeah, I have to say, we are seeing an expansion on the, on the older brackets. So, for example, people even, we are, we have been asked to have to deliver tours for 50 plus that we don't, because we, we, we stop at 49. But that's an increasing demand for people over 45 to travel with us. On the other end, on the lower end, I will say in terms of age, that's like a constant new flux of people coming in. But we have to change a bit narrative, because our narrative has been focused again on a specific generation, which was millennia in their 30s. And again, these millennials now can really adult people so that they change. So, we have to, to now to balance basically to the three different generations. We have a bit of the, the gene X, we are core target of millennials, but millennials that are like the more adult and the younger. And then we have to see and it's different. And so, we have to try to find out the balance. What can tell you is not changing is the need to, for travel companions for people to throw it or for making your friendship. And the point of it is very important is that we, our promise and we keep it is you live solo, you depart solo and you come back with friends. In fact, people come back as friends and they stay friends for a long time after the trip, even forever. That's beautiful. And how, what advice would you give to a founder or someone who's running a business now that is community based from a customer perspective is very community based. What advice would you give them and like what are some of the most common mistakes that you see people building community based businesses like what are they making the mistakes? I believe that one of the key mistakes that I'm currently seeing is people misleading the concept of community. I don't think that community is just an audience like I heard many people say our community is, we have a community of about 200,000 followers. That's not a community, that's an audience. Or they are building a tech stack to host their community. Why do I believe that this is a conversation that we are having internally. I always been an advocate or using community tools that already existing. And why we use what's up, we use again, the Amazon only some we use in telegrams that we are using even even Facebook groups that are still working. even if the people see You know, Facebook is dead, whatever. Yes, Facebook is probably dead. Facebook groups are there. They are still there. They are stronger on their Reddit, on a way, if a Reddit is coming along in a very strong way. But the point is, if you want to run a community, you don't need to build a software. If you want to run a community, you need to gather people around and interest a condition, whatever. So in our case, we were like people looking for other people. For other people to throw away. Maybe you can run a community around a passion. We can run a community. Even around, yes, a peculiar stage of life, but the point is not about the tech. It's about the ability to deal with people and the ability to bring people together. I always see often, not always. I often see founders focusing on building the software and not the community itself. And at that point, I believe has been paramount for us. And I think it's very important, is bringing to the real life, into real life. Because it's a, and so, and I see this trend happening now, in terms of doing meetups, running meeting people, creating a network of ambassador, but very tight of the mission. Just you cannot buy, sorry, you cannot just pay someone to be an ambassador. You have to, someone believing in your mission, your vision, and then give, give him autonomy to represent yourself. You have to, give up with control. But to start the first natural effect. Otherwise, you want to work. You risk to spend money in building something that can be just transactional as not like real. Yeah, no, totally. I get it. Fabio, this has been, yeah, a bit of a masterclass, right, in terms of how to build community work. And where can founders find you or reach out to you if they want to connect with you and kind of go into this topic in more detail? You can find me pretty active on LinkedIn. Sometimes I write in Italian because I have a bigger reach in Italian. Sometimes I'm writing a posting in English. But it's mainly say LinkedIn, for sure, you find me. You end your interest. I publish every year, along from article about the world story in the past two months. So you can read everything. I'm pretty transparent. We disclose numbers, even failure, so if you're interested in the whole story, you can find my LinkedIn. Epic. Fabio, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, Sam. [MUSIC PLAYING]