RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – It all started at the 2018 World Cup. Entrepreneurs Leonardo Brito and Diogo Leão saw that the host country for the Championship would be Russia — and, betting that the amount of Brazilian tourists there who speak the local language would not be expressive — decided to test a new hypothesis: an app capable of connecting people who need a personalized tour, with guides who speak Portuguese.
Three years later, what was born as an idea became a tourism startup that raised R$2 million (US$370,000) in 57 hours, in a round organized by CapTable, a company specialized in startup investments.
From the idea to the consolidated operation, three years went by – and the founders’ routine changed from water to wine. Both Leonardo and Diogo worked in large companies and had to leave their established careers to accelerate the growth of the company from the beginning.
The effort seems to have paid off with the change. In April 2019, when it was founded, iFriend had 1,000 registered tour guides, a presence in 40 countries and around 300 cities. Today, the company is present in 125 countries and, in more than half, has guides who speak Portuguese — including in destinations such as Mongolia, Alaska, and Tasmania. In revenue, the traveltech grew 30% per month from 2019 to March 2020 (the company does not disclose absolute figures). In all, more than 20,000 users are registered with iFriend.
For its founders, iFriend’s differential lies in this extreme customization capacity, allied to services in Portuguese. Today, companies like AirBnB and GetYourGuide offer similar services for tours and experiences, but they do not reach this level.
“Offering guides in Portuguese anywhere is fundamental for us. Today, 95% of our clients are Brazilian and we know the challenges that a second language, even for the upper classes, can represent,” says Leonardo Brito, CEO of iFriend.
Some of the company’s competitors are GetYourGuide and the experiences offered by AirBnB itself. In the case of the first company, pre-formatted tours in several cities around the world can be found (but not the tour that suits the extreme needs of the traveler) and, in AirBnB, experience services are offered in more than 60 countries, but the company does not detail in how many of them the Portuguese-speaking guides are available.
Despite this, tourism allied with experiences is still a significant part of the strategy of companies like these — and it’s not just today. In 2018, AirBnB made a US$5 million investment to expand its service in the United States, given that the profit margin of these experiences compared to lodging was higher. The move was viewed optimistically by Morgan Stanley, which highlighted the fact that experiences could turn less frequent users into “superusers,” increasing the company’s revenue.
The possibility of securing margins like these, coupled with signs of tourism recovery — data released in 2020 showed that the tourism sector made R$12.8 billion in September, up 28% compared to August and a number three times higher than in April, the peak of the crisis — were some of the main factors that drew the attention of investors during the CapTable fundraising.
Source: Exame