1. Piiine
www.piiine.com
Nikolay Kukushkin, Product Development
nk@piiine.com
+7 903 282 92 62
Management:
Product Development – Nikolay
Kukushkin
Product Design – Konstantin Stihe
Software Development – Mike
Bobrov
Software Development – Igor
Gerasimenko
Industry: online travel
Stage of Dev.: Early Stage
Employees: 4
Founded: 2013
Tech Platform: Ruby on Rails
Trailing 12 months revenue: €300
Monthly Net Burn: Breakeven Date: During 2014
Law Firm: GWT
Beskudnikovsky blvd. 32-6-248
127474 Moscow
Russia
Business Description:
Road trip is a travelling from town to town, from hotel to hotel. It is not easy to choose and
book a hotel for the car trip. First of all you have to select the city, then to find the hotel it
in. Or maybe it would be better to choose the hotel not in the city but nearby? Then you
need to make sure that the hotel is along the route, not 100 km to the north. Then you will
open several tabs in browser with Booking.com, Airbnb.com, and Google Maps with your
route and you will have to switch among them all the time. Number of hotels grows every
year and now you need to choose among hundreds of them in each city. In the end, it is
becomes almost impossible to choose hotel in the monastery, but not the motel along the
route. Of course, Booking.com, Expedia.com, Airbnb.com give great support if you are
choosing hotel in one exact city. But there is no service that could give support in choosing
hotels along the route of road trip, which means between two points and in exact radius
from the point.
Products/Services:
Inspiration, searching and booking hotels along the route of the road trip with the help of
coordinated wish lists of hotels.
Piiine service is based on algorithm of calculation and presenting hotels not in radius from
the exact point, but along the route built through several points. You could choose over 400
000 hotels and apartments from different services (for example, booking.com, airbnb.com).
User could find and book hotel using search or using wishlist.
Target Markets:
On the earlier stage Piiine is focusing only on Russians who are travelling by car in the country and abroad (fly&drive audience).
Audience – 450 000 travelers. Market size – $470 mln. Year growth rate – 15%. On the second stage we will expand business to emerging
markets (9 mln. travelers, $9,4 bln. market size), Western Europe and US.
Strategy/Barriers to Entry:
First of all, Piiine's market niche is not attractive for major players, such as booking.com, expedia.com, it is not their core business.
Second of all, as the project idea is not unique and simply copied, major players do not have flexibility for developing similar projects,
but they might be interested in purchasing similar project. To distance from new players Piiine will increase reputation of supplier of
high quality content and will provide regular new content.
Customer Pipeline:
Closed beta-version of Piiine.com has been launched in July 2013. Since than we have received over 350 request for the invite, we got
traffic more than 5000 unique users, about 50 clients who booked over 70 nights. At the moment customer pipeline: search hotel ->
choose hotel -> redirect -> book hotel. The basis of earlier adopters acquisition strategy is a Piiine's loyalty program. Piiine propose
users opportunity of earning money. Piiine is sharing its commission with the creator of the list if hotel was booked from this list.
Competition/Substitution:
There are two strong competitors on the global market who are solving same problem. Roadtrippers.com is 3 years old US based start
up, who has got over $5 mln. investments during these years. ViaMichelin.com is an old European project from well-known publisher of
travel guides. There are no competitors on local market.
Business Model:
Content meet eCommerce. Piiine users create lists of these hotels for road trips that are visible for all others users if service. Each list
is basically advertisement of niche hotels assortment, selected manually by exact user. Unique features of each list are personality of
user and mythology of purchase which users touch adds to the selection. Therefore Piiine is not required marketing budget,
advertisements are made by users. Business model is very simple. User book hotel from the list. Piiine gets commission for leads
generation from booking.com. List creator gets part of this commission for creating of popular list.
Distribution/Sales Model:
Affiliation model of working with hotel services suppliers (booking.com, airbnb.com, agoda.com, home away.com). Commission from
supplier is 4% to 10%. Average commission for each booking $25-$30. High conversion 5%.
Financials:
Revenue, mln.
EBITDA, mln.
2014
€0,3
€-0,1
2015
€1,9
€0,4
2016
€4,8
€1,2
Key Problem Solved for Customers:
Difficulties in the preparations for the road trips and finding and choosing hotels for the trip.
More information: www.piiine.com
2017
€11,1
€2,4
