Tell us a bit about Cyclando, how the product came about, and what problem it solves.

Cyclando is all about making it easy for everyone to plan and book a cycling holiday across Europe. We started with the idea that traveling by bicycle is the best way to visit the country; it allows you to fully appreciate the different landscapes and destinations.

However, organizing a cycle trip comes with its pain points. There are lots of logistics to navigate. For example, you’ll need to find a hotel within cycling distance, which is also accessible by bike paths. Highway hotels can’t be an option. If you're using your own bike, you’ll need a safe place to store it, and if it's an e-bike, a charging station. You likely also want to cycle without the weight of luggage, so you'll need a service to transfer it between hotels. And at the end of the holiday, you'll need transportation back to the starting point for you and your bike.

Organizing those logistical details is pretty complicated. And, Cyclando simplifies the process from start to finish. We started by collecting information on all the available cycling tours across Europe. Tour operators are usually experts at arranging tours, but there is yet to be a digital or data transmission standard in the industry. Therefore, organizing a cycling holiday often involves lots of manual work, like emails or phone calls with an agent. So, we aggregated tour operators specializing in cycling holidays and digitalized all available tour options.

 

What is Cylando's main value proposition that differentiates it from its industry competitors?

We make organizing and buying a cycling holiday quick and simple. We allow people to browse competitors, compare different options and combine services to create customized trips.

 

As we know, cycling was your passion before you started your business. How does it feel to now have your hobby turned into a profession?

Cycling has actually been my profession for the past twenty years. I started as a bicycle tour guide across Europe, taking clients around cities like Paris, London, and Amsterdam. Then, I moved from the bike to the desk and got involved in administrative roles like planning, marketing, and testing processes.

It was a long process to transform my passion into a job. And ironically, I don't have time for passion anymore. Nowadays, I spend most of my time talking and writing about cycling holidays, but unfortunately, I don't get to cycle as much as I used to myself.

 

How did you form the team you're currently working with at Cyclando?

As a startup, our team often changes as we're still in the early stages. Finding the right people is important yet very difficult.

Our team underwent a lot of change, especially last year. Thanks to our collaboration with Redberry, the technical side is well-organized, and I'm very satisfied with this part. Finding developers in Italy was very difficult. The developers we saw were either less experienced than we wanted or were tremendously expensive, which really slowed down the process. So we were struggling at the beginning, but we’re very happy now on this side. 

However, there are still some manual processes in sales. Our team isn’t in the final configuration; we're still working on finding the right combination of people, which is quite usual for a startup like us.

Thanks to our collaboration with Redberry, the technical side is well-organized, and I'm very satisfied with this part.

How did you come across Redberry? What were you looking for outside of the outsourcing partner?

 I met Redberry’s team at the Web Summit. At that moment, we faced challenges with developers because we were moving up from our MVP, which was built on WordPress and was unstable and ineffective. So we were looking for a skilled Laravel developer. At that moment, we had one developer who was not enough and didn't have the seniority we required, so we were looking for a solution.

Then, we organized a crowdfunding campaign that gave us enough money to start our cooperation.

 

What was the main factor that made you decide that Redberry was the way to go?

We loved the flexibility. Redberry didn’t want to take over our project; they just brought people into our team. That was really important because we were not looking for consultancy; we had a clear idea of where we wanted to go. With a CTO already in place, we simply needed a developer who could fully integrate into our team.

This approach was new to us because most companies take over the project and assign a project manager as an intermediary between the developer and the company. In this case, no project manager was involved. We had been looking for this kind of setup but hadn't found a company that provided it until Redberry.

Another aspect of flexibility was that we could start and stop our collaboration whenever we needed to. This lack of a long-term commitment was essential, as it could have been risky for us. Eventually, we ended up collaborating with Redberry for more than one year. Initially, we had one senior and one junior, and we realized that the senior developer wasn't necessary anymore; Redberry was flexible enough to adjust to our needs, so we replaced the senior developer with another junior developer, which helped us save money.

Finally, another great thing about Redberry is the quality of the developers. The level of even junior developers was significantly above what we had experienced before.

Did Redberry pass the expectations vs reality check?

Yes, Redberry met our expectations. Our CTO, Alessio, is very happy with your work. At first, we were suspicious because of previous bad experiences with developers.

I've heard stories of many companies hiring outsourced developers and struggling with communication and quality. In Redberry’s case, both were perfect, so it was all beyond expectations.

What are your plans for the future?

Our goal is to work with hotels before the end of the year. We want users to easily plan their stay by selecting hotels on a map. This needs to be integrated with the API of big hotel companies. This will be a huge step forward in our growth process.

We’re also designing an admin panel for the Cyclando website, which will serve both tour operator companies and end users. That's our goal for the second quarter.