Business Journey: Matt Fox of Snaptrip.com
Inspiration
From marketing dinosaur to tech startup superstar, Matt Fox tells us about hunting for a co-founder for Snaptrip.com, the importance of staying humble and cultivating your mentor network.
Tell us about your business, what does it do?
Snaptrip.com is a trusted marketplace for travellers to discover the best last-minute cottage, apartment and lodge holiday deals in the UK, Ireland and other European destinations. With more than 60,000 properties available on the website, Snaptrip.com helps people find and book last-minute accommodation with discounts of up to 60%.
What did you do before you started this business?
I’d spent my career focused on marketing, but old-fashioned, print newspaper marketing (either PR or advertising), meaning I’m a bit of a dinosaur! I’ve always been involved in the property side of things, marketing either the sales or holiday rental side of international properties. The previous role I had was in a holiday rental startup that we built nicely and sold the year before I started Snaptrip.com.
What inspired you to start up?
The challenge, pure and simple. The previous business I’d been involved in, I was there from the start, but I wasn’t the CEO or a proper founding member. I learnt a lot through that process and when it was all done, I had the idea for Snaptrip.com and wanted to challenge myself to see if I could get it off the ground.
When you launch a tech startup, you’re constantly battling very high probabilities of failure, so while I had faith in the idea and my strategy to get it up and running, I knew the likelihood was that it might not all work out.
The first year or so was just experience and challenge and trying to push it as far as I could. That first year looked pretty good, so I set about seeing if we could push it another year and another year after that. And here we are now growing revenues around 100% in each of our seven trading years - 24 members of staff and profitable.
How would you describe your business to your grandma?
It’s a website that helps people rent holiday homes for good deals.
Where do you get advice, support or help?
When I launched the business, I put pressure on myself to find a mentor that I could turn to regularly. What I quickly discovered was that it was never going to be one person – I have a handful of people I speak to regularly about everything. I have people I turn to for business advice, funding advice, growth advice and those that understand the personal challenges of doing what I do. Almost everyone I turn to for help are investors. I have a very good relationship with all my investors.