Transcription
As a founder, you are taking the biggest bet and risk on yourself and your life.
Being born in Algeria, my moonshot was New York City, and I went straight to New York. I don't have a proper education; I don't have a proper sort of route to becoming a founder. For me specifically, I don't have the option to fail, and so giving up is absolutely not on the table. Every decision I make, I doubt, but then there is a stubborn persona in me. So, as long as your vision is the same and consistent, and what you're delivering is clear to the world, how you get there doesn't really matter. What is truly imperative is the reinforced principle of believing; you really have to believe that your product is helping people. And I think perseverance and any hardship I had going through life helped me become a better human first, and then a better founder.
My name is Khaled Maneri, co-founder and CEO of Selfbook. Selfbook is really providing the infrastructure for travel. So, if someone is on the website and has intent to book that hotel, we should eliminate as much friction as possible to increase conversion. Before Selfbook, no hotel in the world could accept Apple Pay, for instance, and so we brought in the digital wallets into the industry. And then now we're adding much more features to streamline the experience even more.
Being born in Algeria, obviously geopolitically we were restricted; we couldn't travel. When the pandemic was an example for a lot of people, how they felt the need to travel but they couldn't. So imagine a world in Algeria where you actually can't travel because it's impossible to get a visa, or especially as a young kid. So when I was able to finally leave, my moonshot was New York City, and I went straight to New York. I walked up Fifth Avenue and discovered the Apple store; it was beautiful. I remember the first iPod ad on Fifth Avenue, or in Times Square—that was a big iPod ad—and I remember how beautiful that product was. I then learned design because they're open for 24 hours; they let you use the Mac. So that that changed my life because I was really inspired by the design and was really inspired by truly obsession of excellence and product excellence, and so made me want to learn how to design and maybe a better product founder.
Uh, my business was purely accidental. As an immigrant, I had to do any job to survive. I really wanted to design products, but I had no education or network or any sort of background to earn the benefit to go and work for someone. I think not going to school here or at all, and not having a strong network when you first move into a foreign country, you have to start somewhere. And so one friend can become your network, right? When I was fundraising, I didn't really know a lot of people, right? I knew two or three people—that's it. And the three of them specifically that I have in mind helped me with a build a network, fundraise; they're still my close advisors and investors and even help me hire and get new customers. So you really can't go at this alone, right? Some will change, some will come, others will go, but whether they will end up there or not, they will always be part of your story.
We're going to touch us with our fingers. When the iPhone launched in 2007, that sparked an idea to design an app; no one had designed for mobile before. So that was a really opportunity for a starting point, and that was Six Agency. I called it Six Agency because I was working out of my apartment 6A, so the name was easy to come up with. This app, in particular, an idea that we wanted to push to some of our clients to say, you don't need a full catalog of products in front of a customer on a small device; the app would show you only one product per day. Sometimes it could be a pencil from Japan, or it could be a beautiful watch; it was highly curated. This is before Instagram, before TikTok, and some of the products and experiences that we started adding is travel experiences. When we showed these experiences, engagement went up 70%, so people really wanted to learn about an experience or buy an experience, but it was really hard to book on the app just because there was no proper booking infrastructure at a time; you had to leave the app and go find the experience somewhere else in some other marketplace to book it. And that's what inspired us to launch the travel app. It was an app designed where you can easily discover a hotel and book it right there and then, but the month we were officially launching it, the pandemic started; every hotel in the world shut down.
Yet I was thinking beyond that: when the world comes back and they would want to travel again. For me, every decision I make, I doubt, but then there is a stubborn persona in me and a relentless drive to create something seamless. And so we had to think of ways where we can pivot. Two key insight points that I received during that time was that no hotel in the world could accept Apple Pay at the time, and secondly, is that launching a consumer app is really, really hard. So for us was, how can we leverage everything we built and still provide this unique customer experience to compete against OTAs? Was an impossible mission; big OTAs use Apple Pay and they have a really streamlined booking experience; some, at least hotels didn't have that, so they didn't have a leveled playing field. So Selfbook provided that to hotels instead of them just continuing to give 25% commission to OTAs because a lack of a streamlined booking experience; we were able to bring that to them. Our view was that if the guest really wants to book a hotel and they are on the hotel website, there's absolutely no reason for them to leave the website and go to an OTA to book that same hotel; they should book it right there and then. And that's where Selfbook really comes in to provide this booking infrastructure, married with uh an end-to-end payment layer. We believe that building a guest-first experience is so much better than just building another B2B product, even though it was a B2B company. When we think of the industry and we think of hotels as clients, obviously the industry is left behind from a technology perspective, and every product that they have was really antiquated, especially on the guest experience, right? Some of these systems were built in the '60s; user behavior was moving fast, but the change was really slow.
Our rapid growth since launch was mainly driven by really being charmingly relentless. You have to push an agenda to an industry that I felt, and I still feel, like the word sleepwalking towards a precipice. A modern payment solution like Apple Pay that uses a cryptogram doesn't really work with a system like Sabre, and so we had to build layers that allows a hotel that still uses Sabre to accept digital wallets, and that was one of the challenges that we solved. But then as we kept on going, we've discovered a lot of other challenges, and one of them is providing flexibility in rates or even providing a single API for platforms to sell travel without having to build every single component from the ground up. And as a payment company at a core, or fintech company at a core, transaction volume was key, and so we had to achieve high GMV early on because we were on growth mode. So you know, we went for hotels with higher average daily rates, or in the industry we call it ADR, so that we can achieve that higher volume. Now again, we scale beyond just luxury, but that was the starting point, and that's what helped us grow really fast. Last year, 2024, we 3xed our revenue; we also helped hotels increase conversion on their websites by 40%, and we also reduce cancellations by 44%.
So these are some of the ideas that we're working on. If you go to an agentic on AI search like Perplexity, and you search a hotel—the best hotel New York City, or I want to stay downtown or in Soho—what if you can book them right there and then without leaving Perplexity? Bringing that to life, it's so powerful; we're suited to build this, and we're super excited to deliver it. Murakami says, "Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional," in his memoir, and it's true. As a founder, you're constantly debating different ideas; a key word that you know we hear every hour of the day is trade-offs. You're constantly trading off different ideas and different assumptions, so sometimes you get it wrong. Our biggest assumption was that we could replace certain systems, but that was more difficult just because hotels are set in their ways, or perhaps they use an on-prem system that it will take decades to shift away from it, and so we had to pivot our ways of thinking and work cohesively with these systems and integrate with them as opposed to completely replacing them, really focusing on what matters most and focusing on what we are good at or we are the best at. So a perfect example: Muse—uh, they are a cloud-native property management system; we're integrating with, and we're really excited to work with them. We don't have to replace anything they do, but working together with them, we enhance the booking experience. And so building an integration layer across the industry was key for our success and our scale.
The first customer on Selfbook is a resort called Neolin. This is a time where almost every hotel in the world was shut down. In July of 2020, I flew to Pennsylvania and went to this resort called Neolin and met with the team, met with the owner, and they were really passionate about their product; they were really passionate about hospitality. Despite the fact that we didn't have a full product yet, and we didn't have uh any track record at the time or any client, they really believed in us; they believed in the vision. It wasn't because it was technical or it would convert better or anything like that; it was because we were obsessed about providing guests a better user experience, and the owner really cared about that. She said at the time, "If it is hospitable, we want it," right? And so that's what we aimed for, and uh that was our first client, and they're still our client; we're proud of that.
Travel is a human connection; travel is a gateway to culture. When you walk into a store, you don't see just a sheet of rates; you see products, and you have a conversation. So I think Selfbook has big visions of its existence: provide the hospitality that the industry is meant to provide anyways from day one. Schumacher, Formula 1 driver, said once, "There is passion; motivation is there," and I feel my passion was always travel, so I was motivated to do so. I think leaving Algeria was allowed me to continue to dream bigger; having that freedom to create regardless of your background or education or lack of which, in my case, was really beneficial. It's it's easy to give up, um, but you can't be a quitter; you have to continue.