Hey Oz! Who are you and what’s your business?

My name is Oz Har Adir, and I’m the founder and CEO of Vio.com (formerly FindHotel). I’m originally from Israel and have lived in the Netherlands for 18 years, having arrived in 2005 as a Bachelor in BA at Erasmus University.

FindHotel BV was founded in 2016, but it evolved out of an affiliate company called Innovative Travel, which I began after graduating in 2010.

Vio.com aims to be the best place to find and book accommodation deals, anywhere in the world.

The company is B2C at its core and this year we expanded to B2C2B via affiliates, which already includes the likes of Skyscanner and TimeOut.

Why did you start it?

I didn’t think there was any place for travellers to search the entire market and find the best deals, so I built it. I began with flights during university but that failed, so I switched to accommodation.

Have you raised funding? How much?

No. I took out a small family loan when starting and returned it our second year. We considered an equity investment but decided that the time-saving vs the common downsides were not worth it for us.

When did you start to focus on profitability?

We were profitable from our second year of operation and have been ever since, with only 2017 and 2020 ending slightly negative. More recently we’ve focused on growing both as profitably and as fast as we can.

What’s your business model?

It is a transaction model, partially affiliate (we refer visitors to other sites to book) and partially marketplace (where visitors book directly on Vio.com). In both cases we earn a commission when customers complete a stay at their accommodation.

How big are you? Can you share numbers that give a sense of your scale?

We generate €50M a year in revenue and employ 180 FTE. We’ve been profitable in each of the past 5 years with the exception of 2020, which was slightly negative.

Take us through the process of building and launching your first version.

We started out as an affiliate, without our own product. This had many advantages, and helped us develop a profit-mindset from early on:

1. We needed almost no capital to get started.
2. We had few product costs — we weren’t building our own product, so we didn’t have the need for any product engineering.
3. We first learned how the industry worked, by getting real data from the inside.
4. We saved a lot, while simultaneously getting paid to learn how to build our own product — a product we knew would work.

Starting as an affiliate is a path few scaling companies take, but it’s actually how Booking.com evolved (from Bookings.nl).

How do you think other Community Members can do something like this?

If you’re a classic SaaS company you could for example become a distributor, and learn how your market works from the inside, before going all-in on building for your industry.

A more common approach for technical founders is to set-up a services / consulting business to serve as an income generator while building their product. This can help ensure you have enough revenue coming in to pay the bills, while also learning from your clients, which can help build your product. Bynder, which was formed out of the service business Label A, is a good local example of such a spin-out.

What metrics do you focus on?

Our main metric is ‘contribution margin’. Volume without profits is easy to achieve in a mature market, but profits means you are doing something right. In our case we are looking for millions in contribution margins per year to justify significant investments in anything.

We also pay attention to retention, such as the share of our visitors coming directly, and the probability a booker will search and book again. Retention is a result of exceptional value in the travel niche, and that’s what we strive for.

What’s been your growth strategy?

In travel getting a demand channel to work is key. At first we focused only on PPC (Adwords etc.), assuming the SEO market was too saturated.

Later, we began specialising in price comparison marketing (Metasearch), developing unique tech, pricing, and bidding to become one of the best in the world in this niche.

Nowadays we’re making in-roads in app marketing and via affiliates, complimenting the first two strategies. However, we waited a long time before we added to these, preferring to focus on executing a few channels exceptionally well first.

On the operational side, when our growth stalls, we slow down — largely hiring — and correct course. We don’t increase spending until we see results improve.

What’s your approach to product?

Originally, we tried to build as little as possible ourselves, focusing only on what we couldn’t find in the market.

Many startups try to build every aspect of their technology in-house, which requires ample investment, and is often based on limited market feedback. Our approach is to build quickly, gather market feedback, and only build in-house when a system becomes core to us, and something the market cannot offer.

Further, our entire product team is treated as a full-time member from day one, with the occasional use of embedded engineers who are also fully integrated into the team. We also set it up so we can hire them directly after 12 months, which has occurred about a dozen times.

What operational challenges have you faced?

The main issues we’ve faced are:

1. Finding enough strong contributors. Our solution was to hire from abroad, and later to hire fully remotely (more on why and how below).
2. Finding enough leaders who can lead significant initiatives. There’s no easy fix here — our solution has been to hire people with high potential and promote them in-house. Occasionally we’ll add an external leadership team member, but we do this rarely, no more than one a year.
3. Building high-performing product teams. We have about 15 product teams today, and it took us ages to get them consistently staffed with the right technical leads, product managers, designers, and analysts to the point we can say that most of our product teams are ‘high performing’.

What’s your approach to hiring, while keeping costs in check?

1. Hire from abroad. We mostly hire from abroad, and more recently we hire abroad remotely. If the timezone works, they can communicate well and work remotely, we’ll hire them. This has greatly broadened our talent pool, helped us hire in reasonable time, and is also cheaper. Our biggest ‘trick’ to finding talented individuals early on was our willingness to hire regardless of location, as long as they were willing to relocate to the Netherlands. This approach does require a higher level of screening, as people from certain countries may be more motivated by the ticket out, than the actual company and role. However, this has also allowed us to hire a lot of highly-motivated people, something that we’ve found not as easy to achieve when only recruiting locally. A specific example we never planned for was Brazil. After two hires from there in 2016, we noticed: ‘Hey, they’re a great cultural fit!’, so we began focusing more on the market. We even worked with a local recruiter for a brief period. Brazil now represents the largest origin country in our company (we have ±30 Brazilians today), and they almost never leave. Those two who originally joined in 2016 recently celebrated their 7th anniversaries.
2. Take bets on hires others may not. Sometimes that means younger, less experienced people, who are talented and willing, but will take some time to mature. This also means we can pay less than we would have to pay ‘All-Stars’, yet more than their local markets offer.
3. Hire wisely. Every wrong hire (or no hire) can set you back by months, and prevent teams from becoming highly effective. It also takes time to build team dynamics. That’s one of the hardest parts of scaling a tech company in my experience. In 2022, when we hit peak scale (hiring 23 people in just 30 days), we noticed a substantial increase in our error rate — only 83% of these hires are still there a year later, an exceptionally low rate for us.
4. Stay flexible. We’ve also made it very easy for people to transfer when they want to stop living in the Netherlands and go back home, or to go from remote to moving here. That’s constantly happening and we have very high retention rates as a result.
5. Never over hire. It’s much easier to add people later to a successful product or team, or shift to focus internally to the best opportunity. Headcount can often be a vanity metric for scaleups, one you’d be wise to avoid in my view.