Guest Post: Bootstrapping our start-up to £1m in annual revenue

The journey from startup to £1M annual revenue is a significant milestone that many start-ups aspire to reach, but only a small fraction achieve. Peter Whittle, CEO & co-founder of digitaltravel.io explains how they did it within three years

digitaltravel.io was established through the merging of my fledgling product proposition, CruiseAppy, a mobile app platform for the cruise industry I had developed and iprogress, a web design and development agency, run by my co-founder Peter Aland.

However, we came into being at the most difficult time in living memory, when travel and cruise were being devastated by the impact of Covid-19 and not generating any revenue. Cruise had been riding the crest of wave at the end of 2019 when nearly 30 million passengers had enjoyed a holiday on the world’s oceans and seas and it seemed the winds were set fair for more impressive growth. Within months of 2020, though, those hopes were sunk and the £150bn industry had seemingly run aground.

Despite this, in 2021, we moved ahead with our new enterprise which was based on a gap I had spotted after working for years in the travel technology arena. Developing an integrated Mobile App and Website platform offering bespoke design and user experience for each travel agency partner but dedicated to the common goal of enhanced customer engagement, inspiration, online holiday booking and ongoing loyalty across any digital device.

With a small but dedicated team of five, we began our operations in a competitive market, sweating the assets of every industry contact we had built over the years in Liverpool and across the world. Despite the challenging Covid environment for the travel industry, we were determined to carve out a niche and establish a market position.

Unique technology

We developed a game-changing integrated app and website platform for cruise sellers plus a fast flight/hotel search solution and creatively deployed API integrations (with established partners such as Traveltek and ArrivalGuides) for travel agents, aggregating all leisure travel product supply via innovative new plugins for fast deployment and scalability.

From the start digitaltravel.io had the right skill sets and people who were already successfully running businesses. My co-founder, Pete, was building great products at iprogress while I had an extensive network in the travel industry through partnerships and 20-years of experience building new revenue streams. We sought no investment and bootstrapped our growth meaning we had to use our resources carefully and strategically. 

CruiseAppy already had some anchor clients and iprogress had previously developed cruise websites and so we were in a position to help with the need for travel agents to invest in the future and be ready for when the world could travel again. Several clients invested in our knowledge and expertise, not for an equity stake but committed revenue streams for a desired outcome, having the right digital assets to better engage with customers and revive their fortunes.

We hit the ground running providing digital travel solutions to businesses across the world, including established players like Cruise Britain, Imagine Cruising, Vision Cruise, Cruise Experts and Captain Cruise; and we continued to develop innovative new services throughout this challenging time by broadening our targeted product offering.

Initial challenges and strategies

Instead of trying to cater to the entire spectrum of digital technology sectors, we focused exclusively on the leisure travel industry, helping to underscore our position as experts in the field and building a cluster of industry case studies in the sweet spot of front-end website and app development. We kept our overheads to a minimum by embracing remote work and outsourcing certain tasks, thus channelling our efforts into core business activities, such as platform development and client acquisition. 

Opportunity overload also became a challenge; as our client base and reputation grew, new sector opportunities became available in booking distribution systems and clients outside our target market. You have to pick your battles when bootstrapping and it was one of the hardest things for my commercial mind saying: “no” to revenue, but knowing the fit was not right for the stage in our growth journey. 

In the process we have found confidence to turn down work – anathema to most start-ups - and in our three years we have learned which opportunities to pursue and which to leave behind. We’ve been small and therefore agile enough to cope with these demands and now our focus is on creating a scalable platform that we can roll out to multiple clients, targeted at the cruise and leisure travel agent sector which is easier to support as we ramp up our operational side of the business.

Our clients are our partners

A key point that still informs our journey is the more customers we attract and retain ensures we have investment coming in. Additionally, with these customers we can iteratively improve our offering, our understanding of customer-value and communication of the value proposition. They’ve pushed us and challenged us and in turn, we have found that this increases advocacy and the profitability of the business. This positions us - if we then need investors to ‘fire up the business’ in the future – to attract good business partners and investors, while being in a strong position when negotiating terms.

Coming out of the pandemic we made a big jump forward by attracting a couple of big hitter clients whose time and resource requirement from us meant they committed retainers that gave us the confidence to recruit new staff and grow our expertise and service offer.

Now, in 2024, we service 67 clients, 59% of which are in Europe, the Americas at the APAC region, having created hundreds of travel and tourism websites, alongside a trusted partner in Traveltek, and boast a 98% client retention rate. Our revenue has increased from £250k in the first year to £1m and we now have 14 people in the team, in bigger offices.

It’s all about the people

It’s in the team where much of the credit for our success lies. In the early days it was the alchemy of complementary skills that propelled our vision but as we have gown and added expert people, we have managed to retain an entrepreneurial spirit, and a positive, ‘all hands to the pump’ perspective while having fun in the process.

It augurs well for our future, because as we continue to grow, there will be more clients around the world and in supporting them we have to follow the sun around the clock - from Australia through Europe to America - and that’s not for the faint-hearted. There can be no passengers here.