Doerz

Idea

Introduction

We believe that no one wants to be a tourist anymore.

These days, people are looking to find deeper cultural learning while travelling. We see rising amount of people wanting to meet the locals who can show them how to live like a local.

The market is moving towards a sharing economy with greater focus on sustainable travel and tailored personal content. People want to book their experiences last minute.

We’ve built a community and platform for travellers and groups to find locals who are willing to meet new people to share their cities and hobbies with - to do what the locals do.

This new way of travelling has been around for a while already but now it is starting to become big business. Even more established traditional companies - such as airlines and hotel chains - are looking to cooperate with us.

We have built our team for this. Our founder has worked in the tourism industry since the late 90's. Our tech lead has been successfully building viral based technology for over 15 years and our go-to-market person has had experience opening markets in Asia.

Intended impact

We feel the way we travel is changing globally. From our understanding, it seems travellers are looking to live like a local, have authentic experiences and meet new people. The view across young travellers is that they would rather consume memorable experiences than physical goods.

Sustainability is viewed to come more naturally to the younger generation who prefer to use responsible companies. We feel strong that people are overall more aware of their impact when travelling and thus want to have their money stay with the local community. With Doerz that is exactly what happens and we are even able to give tools to locals which enable them to participate in the travel business. To our knowledge, this is an option that was not previously available to travellers and local communities.

We aim to provide a sustainable way of travelling. We want to have people experiencing deeper cultural learning while travelling. We believe that when you've met a local and spent time with him/her, you are less likely to exploit the surroundings and the culture - you know what the local life is all about.

Substantial accomplishments to date

Processed money growing as follows:.
Q2 growth from Q1 is +197%.
Q3 growth from Q1 is +700%.

Timeline:
Summer 2017: crowdfunded in Finland (100k€+, 1M€ pre-money), we promised to build the technology and start internationalisation. Both of which we have successfully delivered.
November 2017: platform went live.
Finnish government supported internationalisation with 50k€ grant.
Spring 2018: Doerz in the Top 3 'most promising digital innovations for travel industry' by Visit Finland.
Spring 2018: first Lapland experiences sold to Europeans.
Spring/Summer 2018: opened in 7 new cities in Europe.
Summer 2018: we sold our first experiences in France, Estonia and Italy .
Fall 2018: 1000+ bookings completed through the platform.
Fall 2018: we have 9 freelance Doerz Ambassadors in Europe.
October 2018: first SaaS products sold.
Late 2018: started discussions with Finland's biggest airline and second biggest hotel chain.

Some of our press:
http://www.goodnewsfinland.com/feature/doerz-le....

Monetisation strategy

We have a commission model and a subscription model.

Doerz receives 20% commission from all transactions completed through the platform.

When a customer completes their booking by paying, we hold the money until 24 hours after the experience, after which we release 80% to the experience provider and retain 20% as commission. No fee is charged to the customer and no fees are charged to providers for listing the experiences. We only take our cut from sales.

We offer a Doerz SaaS product to city-owned tourism organisations with a monthly subscription fee, paid in advance for 12 months.

Many of the tourism organisations see the value in our offering.To our knowledge, we are the first company to offer a travel platform where local individuals can be the experience providers and part of the offering rather than just companies.

We also receive a commission from the transactions completed through our SaaS platforms.

Use of proceeds

We intend to use the proceeds as follows:
1. 60% on making the team stronger by recruiting for outreach/partnership/sales role.
2. 40% on building European markets in UK, Germany, Holland, Italy and France as well as preparing for the Asian market.

We will consider leveraging the investment with a loan if needed.