[quote style=”boxed”]”…learn to be more patient and stop to think before [you] jump into doing things right away.”[/quote]
Barbora Nevosadova is a co-founder of travel planner Tripomatic.com and visual flight search engine WhichAirline.com. In her work she combines two of her passions – traveling and online marketing. She loves traveling without a travel agency and she aims to make life easier for people who want to plan trips on their own and make the most of their holiday. She has been working on travel projects for over 8 years.
As a side project she has been involved in developing a mobile app for young children called Animal Train for Toddlers. She came up with the idea after looking for apps for her son and finding out that there were just a few great apps for 1 to 3 year olds. She decided to try out if she was able to create an app that would be both educational and entertaining for young kids.
Barbora studied business administration in the Czech Republic and Finland and e-commerce near the polar circle in Sweden. During her stay up north, she fell in love with Scandinavia, even though she is not a big fan of winter sports or cold weather. Apart from traveling, she enjoys wine, good coffee and swimming in the sea.
What are you working on right now?
My main project is travel planner Tripomatic.com that helps independent travelers make their personalized travel guides.
Where did the idea for Tripomatic come from?
My husband and I were planning a trip to Switzerland and the planning took just too long. At first, I was excited to plan this trip, but after a while it was just boring chore I had to do. I looked for an online tool that would help me with planning, but I could not find anything useful. I discussed the idea with my husband in Switzerland and we decided to make this tool ourselves.
How do you make money?
Tripomatic is a free tool and we get commissions on travel-related services such as accommodation or tours that our users book via Tripomatic. We also sell premium content in our mobile apps.
What does your typical day look like?
I take my son to the kindergarten and then go to the office. When I have no meetings, I spend most of my time working on marketing for Tripomatic. After work I spend my afternoons with my son.
How do you bring ideas to life?
I hate when things are not moving forward fast enough. Bringing ideas to life is really easy for me, but I learnt to be more patient and stop to think before I jump into doing things right away. In the past I started few projects because I did not do proper research on the industry and I lost a lot of time because of that. Now I am more careful about what I really want to do and I choose only the most interesting things.
What’s one trend that really excites you?
I love watching how technology, smartphones and tablets are changing education. I think there is still huge potential how to make education more fun and engaging, but the progress in this area is stunning.
What was the worst job you ever had and what did you learn from it?
I was teaching English at local high school where many students had some kind of behavioral problems and they were not interested in learning anything. It was a challenging job and it made me realize that I must work pretty hard to be able to choose what I really want to do and to be able to do it my way.
If you were to start again, what would you do differently?
If I started with Tripomatic from scratch now, I would focus mostly on mobile phones. First, we built a website and then we developed mobile apps to complement the website. This time I would do it the other way round.
As an entrepreneur, what is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?
I always try new products and think about how to improve them. I do it mostly as a personal challenge to see if I can come up with a better product and I practice looking at various businesses from different aspects.
What is one failure you had as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it?
At first, I underestimated how fast smartphones would change the online travel industry. I realized my mistake quite soon, but because of that we lost few months in our mobile apps development and we had to work much harder to catch up with our competitors.
What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?
I would love to see a service that would offer smart window shopping – I would enter the item I was interested in and the service would offer me available options. I would rate these options and according to my rating it would select the things according to my taste. I believe the technology behind this service could be sold to many e-shops as well.
If you could change one thing in the world, what would it be and how would you go about it?
I would provide education to all kids round the world. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to do that.
Tell us something about you that very few people know?
I plan to spend few months in Australia in the future. When I was studying, I spent one year in Finland and one year in Sweden and I think that living in a foreign country for longer time is a great experience.
What are your three favorite online tools or resources and what do you love about them?
One of my favorite tool is Appbot, which is a free service that sends you AppStore reviews and your brand Twitter mentions by email. I also like AppFigures – App Store Analytics tool with very user-friendly interface that offers features such as App Store rankings all over the world updated every hour etc. I would also recommend UserTesting.com that helped us find issues on our websites and apps and make better products.
What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?
I have just recently stumbled upon the book “The End of eBay: The Rise and Fall of eBay’s Biggest Powerseller” by Michael Marcovici. He describes his experience of becoming one of the European biggest sellers on eBay and then losing his company suddenly. It’s a fascinating book even if you do not sell anything on eBay or run any e-shop because it is unusually open and it gives great insights into the business.
Three people we should follow on Twitter and why?
Travel tech journalist Sean O’Neill – @sean_oneill to know the most important news from the travel industry.
Rand Fishkin – @randfish to learn more about search engine optimization, content marketing, startups etc.
And Clients From Hell – @clientsfh just for fun.
When was the last time you laughed out loud? What caused it?
I laugh out loud every time when I’m with my son because I’m always surprised what ideas he can come up with.
Who is your hero, and why?
I admire all people who are not afraid to start new things, take the risk and try to change something.
What changes do you see in online travel?
I have been working in online travel for over 8 years and I see that the whole industry is shifting more towards mobile phones. The number of people using our websites on mobile has doubled in last few months and nowadays you need to offer truly great experience for people using their mobile phones to succeed in the industry.
What are your plans for the near future?
For the first time, we consider getting outside funding for our company to accelerate our growth. I am really excited about this and I look forward to the new chapter for our company.
Connect:
Barbora’s Email: [email protected]
Barbora on Twitter @nevosadova
Mario Schulzke is the Founder of ideamensch, which he started a decade ago to learn from entrepreneurs and give them a platform for their ideas.