The journey of building a successful startup is one that requires large amounts of passion, discipline, a great idea, meticulous planning, and masterful execution—and all of these individual factors should be brought together in perfect unison to ensure one’s survival.
While many aspiring entrepreneurs start out with the idea of changing the world for the better, very few do—in fact many don’t even survive their first year. And building a powerful brand and a large consumer base is a feat that many never reach.
So how does one reach a million users within a period of 3 years like HotelQuickly?
HotelQuickly is a last-minute hotel booking app that promises to help you find a bed (along with room service and other amenities) near you. HotelQuickly is an app to have on your smartphone while you travel the world or wander around life aimlessly.
Well to find out the answer to that question, we reached out to the team at HotelQuickly and this what they had to say.
1. What are the factors that startups need to consider in order, to accommodate a large user/client base? What were some of them that your team had to consider?
HotelQuickly believes that building a product that’s lovable is of a greater importance than embarking on an extremely lavish marketing campaign—although in some cases it could prove helpful.
They believe that investing $10 in the product (don’t forget about the user experience) and $1 in marketing is much better than the other way around. When one creates a product that’s lovable, usable and relatable, people tend to refer their friends to it and in most cases, that’s the right way to get things done.
2. What were the challenges that your team had to adapt to? And how?
The three challenges that they continually face are involved with—localization, market research and consumer behavior. To ensure that they monitor these issues correctly, they placed a dedicated QA team in place to carry out strict, systematic processes to ensure that the HotelQuickly app always performs to the best of its quality.
“We also lookout continually for new trends and reflect on our business data to adapt quickly to consumer behavior”, the HotelQuickly team added.
3. What were the strategies used by HotelQuickly during its growth?
“We have grown significantly by partnering up with more than 6000—three to five star hotels—till date and by offering prices that are on average 30% lower than what you would normally find online,” said the HotelQuickly team.
They also rely heavily on word-of-mouth via social media and performance marketing and they do have referral mechanisms in place to ease the process of user acquisition.
4. What are some of the ways that startups can use to source funding when they are planning to expand to a user base of a 1 million users?
They mentioned that startups should look into the avenue of incubator funding and preferred stocks—as both are effective funding methods for startups.
5. What’s next? What can your users expect from you now that you’re established?
HotelQuickly said, “At HotelQuickly, we believe that spontaneous moments enrich your life. We believe people can and should experience spontaneous travel that isn’t just easy, but affordable as well.”
“We are observing the market and can, thanks to our agile engineering team, deploy new features or even app versions quickly. We have manifested our intent of being at the forefront of travel tech innovation by launching an Apple Watch app before any OTA in Asia Pacific. We believe in the future of wearables. We’re bringing travelers an exclusive service that makes last-minute hotel booking even faster and much more rewarding”, the team explained.
Currently, they are expanding their team in Malaysia to cater to the geographical diversity at hand and to also support the relentless business growth that we continue to experience.
Interested candidates can visit the We Are Hiring section of their website to check out the vacancies.
“If you love challenges and would like to work for a fast-growing organization with an outstanding team, join us!” –HotelQuickly
Also, you better love eating pizzas and drinking coffee. Because based on the image above, they sure do seem like they take a lot of it.