SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 455: Exited in 2013, Now Moving From "Job" To Startup CEO Again. How? with Ariel Camus
22 Oct 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
Chapter 2: What was Ariel Camus's experience with TouristEye before selling it?
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.
Chapter 3: How did Ariel's acquisition by Lonely Planet impact his career?
We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 4: What is HackerPath and how does it differ from traditional education?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, every Monday I give one of you a hundred bucks to invest in your idea and to get to the top. To enter, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you subscribed. Last week's winner was Dr. Paul Vasquez.
Chapter 5: What challenges did Ariel face when starting his new project?
Dr. Paul Vasquez with My Ads Nation. And he currently is working a full-time job and is dying to get out. Nathan Latke here. Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll learn from Ari Mirza. They did 700 grand last year via his agency, and he is now entering the group coaching space. But why?
Chapter 6: How does Ariel plan to monetize HackerPath in the future?
Coaching stinks. Top Tribe. Good morning. Nathan Latke here. Our guest today is Ariel Cumis. He is a product builder, 500 Startups alumni, and former Tourist Eye CEO and co-founder, which was recently acquired by Lonely Planet.
Chapter 7: What insights does Ariel have about balancing corporate work and entrepreneurship?
He's currently building a new education system based on collaboration between peers and and bots. Ariel, are you ready to take us to the top? Hey, how are you? I am doing good, man. Okay, what year did you exit TouristEye? I assume that was your first business?
Chapter 8: What personal advice does Ariel share for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Yeah, that was my first company. It got acquired in 2013. Okay, 2013. And what was the... Just describe this real quick. What was TouristEye? It was a travel guide for mobile devices with all information offline. There are multiple applications doing the same right now, but we were the first ones to do it back in 2010. Okay. And what was your revenue model? How did you make money on that?
We had different models. Most of the money was coming out of referral fees that we were getting when our customers were booking a hotel or a flight through us. We also had some premium features in the application, and we had up to 10,000 paid users of the application. And what was the... had you raised funding for TouristEye or no? Yeah, we raised close to $1 million before the acquisition.
The opportunity got acquired just when we were raising our Series A. That million dollars that we raised happened between two rounds, one in Europe and one in San Francisco, through 500 startups. When you were raising that Series A round, what valuation were you aiming for? Between six and seven. Okay, so is it fair to say that the acquisition by Lonely Eye was for between six and seven million?
No, we can't disclose that number. It was a number that made our investors happy and every employee happy, which is something I'm really proud of. But I can't disclose the exact number, but it's a seven digits figure. Talk to us about why, don't disclose the number, but why was what you sold for not equal to your opportunity cost, which was the Series A valuation you had?
Yeah, that's a great question. We were in a hard spot. There were a lot of other companies trying to do something similar, and one of them had raised close to $60 million. Which one? GoGoBot. They put ads and a lot of people in a really tough place because even with that amount of money they had raised, they were not doing great as a business.
So every time we were having a conversation with an angel investor, things were really well because they really trusted our team and our execution were super lean. But when we were talking with a VC, for example, their answer was always the same was we have seen dozens of business similar to yours and none of them is becoming a real profitable business.
Not even the ones that have raised millions and millions of dollars. So why are you going to make it possible? And it was really hard to answer that question because, I mean, you can talk about user experience. We had a few things that we were doing very different. But in terms of revenue, we didn't have a lot to show yet compared to the other players. So that was a hard spot.
So that's why we decided to like kind of explore ways of joining a bigger company. And it was just by coincidence that Lonely Planet talked to us the week that I was exploring and talking about that opportunity with other companies. So it just it just happened. And it was to you to say no to that. So you sold in 2013. How old were you when you sold? I was 27. Six, 26, 27. Okay. So what?
You're 30, 31 now? 29. 29. So what have you been done since 2013? What are you focused on? Well, after that, I joined Lonely Planet. It's been a really exciting journey there. It's a publishing company. They've been telling books for over 40 years. My role has been to work in the digital product side, trying to change the way the company thinks about how to build products.
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