I just wanted to introduce a startup located only a few minutes drive away from HouseTrip in Lausanne, Switzerland. We find their services pretty awesome so we wanted to share it with you.

RouteRANK is a software solution for travel planning. Unlike other solutions that consider only one means of transport at a time, routeRANK addresses the entire travel route by integrating rail, road and air connections. In a single search, routeRANK’s technology finds and ranks the best possible travel routes, allowing users to sort them according to their priorities such as price, travel time and CO2 emissions.
RouteRANK also offers custom developed versions of its proprietary software to corporate customers and organizations, for their internal use or use on their own website, in travel and logistics.
The routeRANK public website illustrates one fully functioning version of the software. Although here the focus is on European travel, airports and flight connections outside Europe are integrated. A widget is freely available for those who wish to easily integrate this routeRANK functionality to their own website.

Do go and test RouteRANK on their website. My guess is you’ll be pretty amazed at how detailed they can calculate a route for you!

Arnaud

Poken

Big congratulations to all! Our fellow Swiss entrepreneurs also won some awards since Poken was elected “Best Real Life Gadget”, Amazee made it to the second place for “Best Social Innovation” and Amiando got a second place as well for “Best Web Application”.

The party was not only reserved to entrepreneurs: there were 2 investors’ awards. There again, a Swiss investor, Index Ventures, got a second place in the category “Best Investor”. Does it mean they invest more often?

Let’s cross our fingers that HouseTrip makes it to the event next year!

You can also read about the event on TechCrunch, Amazee’s blog and Poken’s blog.

The concept: to take Switzerland’s “top” one-hundred people in the entrepreneurship field and send them for 24 hours in the nature. No sleep, lots of sport, drinking and extreme networking!

This year, we all went to the Jungfraujoch, in the middle of the Swiss Alps.

The Jungfrau summit

The destination had been kept secret until the very last moment, when we had basically arrived there. We had received an email warning us that it might be a bit cold but, personnally, this being the month of July, I went there wearing shorts and light shoes (I still brought a rather warm jacket but that was it…). I had quite a shock when, a few hours after my departure from sunny 30°C Lausanne, I found myself in the snow by -2°C!

Finding myself wearing shorts in the snow!

Anyways, the event was fantastic and the people attending all extremely interesting. Below you can see a few pictures of the event (update: you can also see picture on Wuala):

The Swiss National Start-Up Team (I am in the top right corner, second from left

I just come back from a great 10-day trip in Boston with the other winners of the “Venture Leaders” competition which together constitute the “Swiss National Start-Up Team”.

The program, prepared by VentureLab and Swissnex Boston (the consulate of Switzerland lead by Pascal Marmier), was really what every entrepreneur can dream to have for his project. Check this: workshops with high-profile entrepreneurs, coaching sessions by teachers of the Babson College, successful start-ups visits, negotiation trainings, networking sessions with investors, pitch competitions, etc.

Also and perhaps most importantly, I got to meet the other members of the team, the next generation of Swiss entrepreneurs. The range of projects – all in the technology field – was very broad, from MedTech to mobile gaming, but without exception very promising! The full list of projects is here. A few words on some projects: we had Virginie, who may have found a cure to cancer (without markers she can identify and purify cancer stem cells); Gilles who developed a very cool face recognition system which may become the standard for logins of all sorts in the future; Matthias who has a mobile gaming platform – Gbanga – which lets you play interactive games in the real world with your phone; Sven who is about to launch Syndicate, the best customized start-page I have seen to date; Christian from Atizo, an online innovation community which helps you generate ideas for yourself or your company; etc. I don’t have enough room for all – sorry – but I am sure that you shall hear about all of them in the near future (and you can anyways read better descriptions of each project here) !

Update: you can also read about the trip on the Amazee blog and check there pictures taken by Daniel Leutenegger.

Below find a few pictures of the trip (special thanks to Raphael from Hyperweek from whom I took most of the pictures):

Stephan Schambach, the founder of Intershop and Demandware, who kindly advised 10 of us on successful entrepreneurship

Two generations at MIT: Joost Bonsen, Mr. Entrepreneurship @ MIT with whom we had a fantastic guided tour of the campus, and a portrait of William Barton Rogers

Presenting HouseTrip

Mick Mountz, CEO and founder of Kiva systems and Entrepreneur of the year 2008 for the New England area

Kiva systems' funny orange robots: allows the complete automation of distribution centers

Pascal, the consul of Switzerland, welcomes the team

Reception at Pascal's "swiss house" in Arlington. We all wanted to be consul afterwards

Conference call with Swissnex Silicon Valley. They welcome all the venture leaders all the time over there: what Switzerland does for its entrepreneurs is truly amazing!

Feeling welcomed at Microsoft's start-up lab

In class with Les Charm, teacher at the Babson college

Ed Marram, great teacher from Babson

Raphael everything about our trip, including HouseTrip You can see the rest of his drawings on Hyperweek, Venture Leaders group

Proudly wearing my new polo

This Friday, the 20 start-up projects composing the 2009 Swiss National Start-Up Team spent the day together at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Apparently Switzerland seems to be the only country in the world to have a national start-up team, if we are to believe this swiss blog, and it is certainly an example to follow for other countries: thanks to initiatives like that, Switzerland manages to be world champion in terms of top startups per capita (28 Swiss projects in the Red Herring top 100)! In this interview on the Microsoft Startup Zone website, Beat Schillig, “Mr. Entrepreneurship” in Switzerland, speaks a bit further about the concept:

“During the last five years, we had more than 30,000 participants attend our networking events and more than 8,000 entrepreneurs in our ‘venturelab’ workshops. The ‘venturelab’ is the governmental training program of CTI, the Swiss Promotion Agency for Innovation, which is run by our organization. And out of this crowd we select 20 ‘venture leaders’ each year – we call them our ‘Swiss national startup team.’”

The day started around a breakfast in a meeting room next to VentureLab’s offices. The venture leaders were meeting each other for the first time and everyone was curious about the others’ projects: I started speaking with Friedrich, the CEO of MedDrop Technologies. What they are trying to commercialize is rather impressive: if I understood correctly, they developed a technology that allows the injection of substances in the body with minimal invasion (no needle, etc.). They work for instance with old race-horses unable to race anymore due to disfunctioning joints: they just spray some substance on the horse’s knees and the substance somehow makes its way to the bone and rebuilds the horse’s cartilage! Some horses even won races again!

After the breakfast, each member had to present his “coat of arms” which he had prepared ahead of the day. The template we had to use is below:

The way the venture leaders introduced themselves

After this small presentation we spoke through a Skype video conference to Pascal Marmier who is the consul of Swissnex in Boston (you can read his interesting profile here on the MIT Sloan School’s website) and who will kindly be welcoming us there. He described a bit further the very exciting program which awaits the venture leaders in Boston: networking with the local start-up scene, individual coaching by teachers of the Babson college, meeting with investors, etc.

It was time for food so we all headed to another part of the university in order to have a networking lunch with the attendants of the conference to which we would participate.

Before lunch we each had received a Poken, which is a small device through which you connect with new friends across social networks when and where you meet them. Cool things!  On the left you can see my Poken: I chose a Panda It is quite practical: since everyone at the conference had one and since I connected with the Poken to everyone I spoke to, I ended up having a lot of new friends on my social networks when I came back home Friday evening!

As you can check on the program of the conference, the speakers were mostly experienced actors of the start-up scene. Stéphane Doutriaux (you can watch an interview of him here), the founder of Poken, was especially interesting to listen to because he was member of the 2008 start-up team and his venture is a huge success. He explained during 40 fascinating minutes all the steps he went through to get where he is now.

Neil Rimer was also fascinating to listen to: he was historically one of the first European VCs with Index Ventures and is at the origin of fantastic success stories such as Skype and Last.fm He spoke about start-ups from a VC perspective: what he is looking for, what is the perfect team, etc. I of course was trying to mentally check if all his investment criteria were matching HouseTrip and was pretty happy with my mental result

All in all it was a great day and I feel very lucky to be offered such a chance!

You can ask most entrepreneurs (well, at least those who start with no financial means): looking for financing is not an easy job, even when you have a great idea!

How did we manage to gather the initial investment for HouseTrip? First of all I think it is a question of speaking about the project and your need of financing to as many people around you as you can: the fear that an idea might be « stolen » if you do so is largely overrated and, in our humble view, should not restrain you. There is simply no coherent reason for it to happen: it would make the « thief » compete 100% with you on an idea you have ruminating in your mind for much longer than him/her… The only risk would be that the idea reaches another start-up or a company in the same field as yours but they would still have to decide to run with your idea (or part of it) and therefore eventually change theirs… Unlikely.

When a project is at the idea level, the amount of available options for financing is almost only limited to the « FFF » (friends, family and fools) and a few business angels: no established investor (venture capitalists, etc.) would take the risk to invest in a concept still not somehow tested by the market, or they would do so at a valuation that is simply not worth enough for you.

The most useful tool to gather investors is the business plan (BP): it might not seem very original to say so but BPs are a must for many reasons. In addition to describing your venture to potential investors (and any other person interested in the project), a BP also helps clarify the idea to yourself: never the HouseTrip idea got challenged as much as during the BP’s redaction, and it got greatly strengthened that way. A well-structured BP is a really powerful tool: indeed, we would argue that all the good things that happened to HouseTrip (gathering the investment, Stephan joining the team, our prizes, etc.) did so thanks to our well-done BP. To complement it, we would also add that you need to do a great PPT presentation that you can pull out whenever you need to present your project (which is more or less all the time when you look for financing!).

Another very important question the BP helps you answer is: how much do you need? A lot of entrepreneurs are tempted to raise too much: they often fail to realize that since a – successful – company’s valuation always goes upward (at least at the seed level), the later you raise money (when you really can’t do without anymore), the better. For HouseTrip, we decided to firstly raise the amount necessary for building the first release of the website (and covering other necessary early costs): only when that release will be built and the market will have confirmed the viability of the concept (hopefully ) will we raise more, because the valuation will be much more attractive for us at that stage.

Another fantastic “instrument” to attract investment is to secure an influential investor in your own particular field/industry: one who other potential investors would know and be impressed by. We were lucky to do so at an early stage: even before winning our prizes we had convinced our first investor, a great milestone in HouseTrip’s short history and one which ultimately lead to our ability to convince further investors!

To conclude on this post, an entrepreneur needs to be very convinced about his concept (for it, the BP is a great tool) and its future success: then he can have the necessary confidence to speak about it (as much as he can) and to recruit investors.

VentureKick

January 2009, a huge milestone for HouseTrip: VentureKick, the most prestigious entrepreneurship contest in Switzerland in the domain of technologies. The competition works in 3 stages: 4 projects win the first stage (and it gives them the right to participate to the second stage), 2 projects will pass the second stage and only 1 will ultimately receive the third stage’s prize, CHF100’000. We had applied to VentureKick back in November 2008 and learned in December that our project was one of the 8 selected (out of approximately 30) to present in front of the jury for the first stage.

The day of the presentation arrived: the 13th of January 2009! The presentation lasted 20 minutes, went well and we were told that we would receive the results within the next 24 hours.

Great news: one day later, we received the following email:

“We are pleased to inform you that your venture pitch has been selected for support by venture kick: you will receive CHF 10’000 to develop your business idea.“

In addition the CHF10’000, we also won a 2-day “kickers camp” during which Jordi Montserrat and Beat Schillig, the founders of VentureKick, would coach us on the project. HouseTrip benefited greatly from the entire VentureKick experience: it forced us to think about all aspects of the business and to synthesize the idea in our minds.

We now look forward to VentureKick’s second stage on the 13th of May 2009!

Venture Leaders

Another contest organized by the VentureKick team, Venture Leaders grants its winners (20 each year) with a 10-day stay in Boston as members of the “Swiss National Start-Up Team”, during which they get coached by teachers of the Babson College and interact with local actors of the start-up field (mostly entrepreneurs and investors).

HouseTrip was one out of 40 projects selected to present on the 19th of March 2009 among approximately 100 applications.

After much suspense, a couple of days after the presentation we received an email came with the title : “venture leaders 2009: you’re in the team!“:

“CONGRATULATIONS! You belong to the winners of the «venture leaders» Prize 2009! You can definitely book your agenda from June 9th to June 19th and prepare for an exciting experience into the entrepreneurial world in Boston.“

Interesting is to have a look at what Paul Sevinç wrote about his experience as a jury member this day.

Back at home in Lausanne, I literally spent 6 months speaking about the HouseTrip idea to everyone I met. I wanted to check that it wasn’t something I was getting excited about on my own, that it was actually something people needed. It was a great feeling and it gave me confidence that everyone saw a lot of potential in the idea.

Junjun and Arnaud

On the way I had of course shared the idea with my girlfriend Junjun who, to my great delight, agreed that we should both dedicate ourselves fully to the project after we would finish our studies in January 2009 (we were both studying hospitality and tourism management at the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne).

Uli

Uli

The next step of the project came in 2008 summer in Austin, Texas. Both Junjun and I were there for HITEC, a hospitality technology event, to represent our school. We noticed the presence of Uli Pillau, who is sort of a legend in the hospitality technology world because he was at the beginning of two of the largest companies in the field, Fidelio Software GmbH and IDeaS. Luckily, we had our laptop with us and on it was HouseTrip’s first introductory ppt presentation. We therefore jumped on the occasion and went to Uli, asking him if he had 5 minutes. He answered he literally only had 5 minutes – I guess that is what they call an elevator pitch – and we therefore quickly opened our laptop, took a deep breath and started presenting HouseTrip the best we could. We ended up speaking during close to half an hour: we had convinced Uli! One of the nicest individuals I have ever met, Uli – a German citizen from Munich – stayed close to the project ever since!

Dominik

Dominik

Another important step in the life of HouseTrip was Dominik, who was to become the 3^rd member of the launching team. Dominik got immediatly convinced by the project: we were both taking entrepreneurship classes (our major) at university but we only remotely knew each other. One day, at the end of a class, we started speaking about what we would respectively do after school and I of course begun describing the HouseTrip project to him. I had not even finished my description of the project that he interrupted me: “It is brilliant, would love to join you!” And that was it: he really was in (I bet most of our readers don’t know and never worked with Swiss-Germans – Dominik is from Zurich – but once they give their word, you can count on it). Months after, we now work together everyday, 100% on the HouseTrip project!

Stephan

Stephan

At this point, we were three people on the team with a lot of knowledge about business, the tourism and travel industry but knew only little about developing a website.

In parallel, we were also looking for financing and in that context we went to Munich to meet with Keith Gruen, the founder of Micros-Fidelio who was introduced to us by Uli. Junjun and I had a very nice lunch with Keith in a hotel called “Anna hotel” and while we were describing him the challenges to find a good solution for the technical development of HouseTrip, he told us he knew someone called Stephan Wiesener who had started a company (Conject) and who had developed his own travel social network, Trekpilots.

We got in touch with Stephan with the intention to get leads on how to overcome the challenges we were having with the development. It was soon clear that Stephan had the right personnality, background and the right attraction for the HouseTrip idea: he has the perfect profile to be on the launching team, as HouseTrip’s CTO. Stephan has great experience and knowledge in development and the Internet: he did a PhD on semantics webs back in 1997, spoke at conferences next to Tim Berners-Lee and developed numerous websites and software. From little knowledge about website development, Stephan joining the team was a great leap forward!

Welcome to the HouseTrip blog!

We thought it would be interesting to launch the blog with a series of posts about our short history: “where it all began” starts at the very beginning, the birth of the HouseTrip idea!

I remember exactly when and why I got the idea for HouseTrip: Junjun and I were driving from London to Lausanne (Switzerland), the car completely packed with all the stuff we had accumulated during the 7-month internship in the City of London and I was thinking about those two events, which – I didn’t know – would change my life.

Finding a Bed and Breakfast (B&B) in Scotland

The first event I was thinking about was when I tried to find a nice B&B for a weekend in Scotland: it doesn’t seem like much of a life-changing event but bear with us

Eilean Donan Castle - Beautiful Scotland!

Since we didn’t know much about Scotland, it would have been nice for us to choose from B&Bs based on their characteristics: close to a lake, in the nature, double-bed, convenient parking, for instance. But we could only click on a specific location and then basically go through each single B&B in that area only.

Finally, because we had heard of it, we decided on the Fort William area and searched in that specific place.

For those of you who already booked a B&B somewhere, you probably know that you have to contact the B&B owners in order to book, direct booking (as we know it with hotels) doesn’t exist. So we started sending out emails and after several days of back and forth communications with several owners, we finally had our Saturday night booked in Fort William!

The big day had come and we merrily drove from Edinburgh through the beautiful Scottish countryside all the way to Fort William where we arrived around 10pm.

Queen's view, next to Pitlochry

The hostess was very nice because, even though we hadn’t confirmed our room during the day (we had totally forgotten to do that!), she had still kept it for us. If you don’t experience such nice hospitality, either remember to confirm your arrival during the day or wait for HouseTrip’s release for direct booking .

Scotland was an amazing experience and its beautiful landscape certainly inspired me greatly for the HouseTrip idea.

Renting out a flat in Lausanne

The second event that helped me shape the HouseTrip idea was when we tried to rent out our place in Lausanne for the month of July. In order to do so, we went to all those “classified ads” websites and posted our property. We limited ourselves to the few ones that are free for posting. The problem we experienced with those free websites was to make our place stand out: to actually show potential guests that it was a nice place to stay at!

Vineyards by the Leman lake, a few minutes away from our place

With only a few small pictures allowed and a field for free text, it was not very easy. In addition to that, our house posting was lost in a long list of other properties: it is almost by coincidence that potential guests find your property, we were thinking… In the end, we only received few enquiries which unfortunately never worked out and thus our place remained empty for the month of July… Sob…

Back in the car: the HouseTrip idea!

And there, back in my car at the border in Dover, I got the HouseTrip idea!

A website that focuses on short-term rentals and which will make the rental process finally fun and convenient for both guests and hosts! When the idea was at the very spark in my mind, I remember picturing many images: a map with a lot of properties tagged on it, an online chat between an owner and a tenant, a “book it now” button, etc. Funny how some mental images stay: they are still in my mind today and I often somehow refer to them – to the original HouseTrip vision – when I need to.

Back in the car, I was trying to arrange my thoughts and to reflect on what HouseTrip could encompass:

• A revenue management system? Yes, so that the rental prices are actually adapted to the demand, inexpensive when the demand is low, more expensive when many people want to stay in a property!
• A great search function so that tenants can find the one property suitable for them? Of course!
• A property profile page? With HouseTrip, hosts will be able to describe their place in as much depth as they want and make it stand out.
• What about direct booking? Yes, like that it is as easy and simple as booking a hotel.
• What about some social features? So that HouseTrip users can give tips to each other and develop a community around the only real way to discover a place: sleep at the locals’ homes!

I was so excited in my car that I genuinely was driving at about 10 miles an hour on the highway, absorbed in my thoughts!

The day I got the HouseTrip idea: picture taken on the boat between Dover and France

A new post follows this one, you can see it here.