Full transcript: Rytis Vitkauskas on London Real
0:00 In London, technology is the silicone roundabout. Introducing a new talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. Silicon Real. Each week, interviewing entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, financial technology, accelerators and incubators in an exciting three-person format. Learn about the people behind the innovation. Locally filmed, locally sourced.
0:34 Silicon Reel. It’s about the people. This is Silicon Reel, the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. I am Brian Rose. I also hooked a show called London Real from these very studios. We get a similar setup, a couple guys in the room. We try to figure some things out. We’ve had People like Tim Ferriss from the four-hour everything. We had Bruce Perry from the BBC series tribe We used to go to Africa and do all that crazy stuff. He was here. We had Max Kaiser here talking about Bitcoin. I had George Galloway here charming the pants off of me. So, you know, it’s a whole host of things We actually just launched a new Android app to show you that we’re on the very cutting edge of technology So if you want to get that for London Real, that’s that’s up right now. But today we’re here to talk about tech This is silicon real my co-host is mr. Bryce keen the founder of all be on drive And if you can look at the facial hair, but you need to trim which needs a trim You would know he is one of the three beards I am indeed and if you don’t know who the three beards are then you obviously don’t live in London Because they run the weekly silicon drink abouts right in this very area of shortage Bryce How are you and where the hell have you been? I am incredibly good. I have been everywhere I’ve been I’ve been back to Australia for three and a half weeks. I’ve been to New York
1:52 I’ve been to Toronto launching Silicon drink about in New York and Toronto We launched in Sofia in Bulgaria while I was away We launched in Sao Paulo in Brazil since I’ve last done that crazy I’m just looking for a reason to go to Brazil and Bulgaria now I need to find a reason to get down there. Those guys are amazing to our organizers I hope you’re listening because we’ll have to get you in at some point But yeah, we’ve gone eight cities now since I was last in this chair facility every Friday night and about hopefully fingers crossed 30 more to come this year. So we’ve had 30 more we have a spreadsheet people have been emailing and saying I want to bring this Friday night drinks to to my city to my town. I want to get all my startup community together for beers on Friday and We want to create a big global family of people doing the same thing every Friday So fingers crossed to be a big year for the bids. I’m quietly confident the beauty expansion awesome, man I love it You know, that’s a that’s a big reason why we’re doing this when I first met you and then the whole drink about kind of came into this, and here we are, episode 30.
2:48 Amazing man. I know. I missed the chair. I missed being in the hot seat. I know, it’s fun, right?
2:53 I’ve been tuning in on the live thing. The live thing is cool. You’re looking at live? Yeah, because I can tune in like if I’m at work or if I was in Australia I could like watch it while I was away, which was great. Well, thanks for coming back, man.
3:01 Please be here more often. Let’s get on with the show. Our guest today is Mr. Reedus Vitkauskas. You got it.
3:07 Very good, right? Nice. Good work. You are the founder and CEO of YPlan, which is, if you don’t know, enables users to buy tickets directly from their smartphones in just a few taps. Exactly. In real time.
3:19 In real time. Same day. I like this. You launched in London in 2012, you launched in New York City last year. I think you’re even going to the west coast of the US. We’ll talk about that in a bit.
3:29 I believe you’ve raised about 12 million dollars in Series A funding from people like Ashton Kutcher, the actor who I tweeted today. Talking about the episode. Yeah, I did. Ask him if he’ll come on. He had tweeted one of our London Real guests from the past, a guy named Adam Grant.
3:43 You know, he’s been into our office. He came in to visit TransferWise at our co-working space at Albion and I found out afterwards and all the women in production now hate me because they feel like I knew and didn’t tell them that he was in the building. He just popped in apparently to say hello with an investor and he just thought he’d come in and say hello. Well, there you go. He’s here in spirit.
4:05 Your other investors include American Express and a bunch of your investors have also invested in Airbnb, Halo, Spotify. It’s quite a big list. So, Rita, sorry. Welcome to Silicon Real. Thank you very much for having me here.
4:17 You know, I read somewhere that Yplan has been downloaded in like over a half a million times and then like 15% of Londoners have this app on their phone. 20 now. 20. Those are big numbers. That’s a serious market penetration.
4:32 I just wondered how you got here. It’s a very good question and the answer to that is really word of mouth. The number one driver for Yplan of growth is word of mouth, is friends sharing with friends the coolness of the app and the events that they like and if they go to an event and they love the tweet afterwards, they say, went to this event, thank you Yplan, it was amazing. And really the proposition when you think about it is quite attractive to a lot of people.
4:59 Be spontaneous. That’s what we say. Be spontaneous. Do something cool right now. Yplan is a very, very simple app in the sense that you fire it up and there’s a short list of events that we have curated and then we also personalize for you.
5:13 So all you need to do is just select one, read a little bit more, or watch a little video on the app. Two tabs, you bought your tickets and you just need to show up at the venue. You don’t need to do anything else, call anyone or print your tickets, you don’t need to do any of that. This is my kind of app, right, so like I’m the worst Ford Planet ever, like I’m always working. We’ll be good friends.
5:33 Yeah, yeah. So I’m working, so I’ve got my day job with Albion Drive and I’ve got my night job weekend job with three beers, I’m always on the go. When I have a night off, I don’t know what to do with myself because I’m usually on the go. So this is like, I love this idea which is like, okay, boom, I can just power it up. I’m not doing anything.
5:49 Maybe my mate’s down the road, I’ll go meet him for a beer. We should do something. He’s a bunch of things. You like music? Bang.
5:56 He’s a bunch of gigs. With tickets. Right. And the simplicity is key. Like we had the Halo guys here and I was like, yeah, your app is really simple.
6:01 And he was like pulling his hair out because he’s like, we’ve got 30 guys making it so simple. Yeah. easy, as opposed to simple probably, right, because it’s really easy to use. But behind that goes a lot of brain power and a lot of investment in terms of time and effort and thought in order to make it so easy. Yeah.
6:19 Because ultimately, you’re a curator. You’re not necessarily delivering a service like Halo. You’re actually, you’re trying to introduce people to things that they would like but that they don’t know about. Well, it ends up being the case that the number one and number two reason why people People don’t go to more events and instead they resort to going there to their pub around the corner or, you know, remain on their couch and grab some popcorn and watch a movie.
6:42 The number one reason why they’re doing that instead of going to more events is that they just don’t know that those events are on. Number one reason, they just don’t know the event is on. Number two reason, they may know the event is on, but they don’t know it’s on today. And so they come back to work on Monday and all the co-workers say, oh yeah, I went to see William and then I went to see Avicii, it was awesome, and you’re sitting there And all I did was drink beer at the corner of the mall.
7:06 Like Bryce King. This is all sounding a little bit familiar. So there you go. There’s nothing wrong with either. But basically, what I’m saying is that YPlant does a very clear job for the consumer.
7:18 And when you’re so focused and actually resonates with the consumer, this is how you can get that sort of viral growth, which is just impossible to engineer in local, mobile, commerce models like ours. OK. I mean, the alternative here is, you know, get a copy of Time Out Magazine every week and you go through these listings and you can’t remember what’s on, you don’t know when it is and you end up knowing everything that’s happening in London and going to none of it.
7:40 At least that’s what happens to me a lot of times. Well, and even if you like something, you know, between you seeing and liking and you going, there is this little step called ticket. How are you going to get there, right? You never know if something that’s listed on a paper or, you know, on a website that just lists stuff, if tickets are available. How are you going to find out on a day?
8:00 It turns out it’s really tricky because a lot of the sites actually stop selling their tickets on the day or the day before because the technology is pretty old and it’s wired for an advanced sales. So what are you to do Mr. Customer when you actually want to go out tonight? Why plan is the answer to that question. You know it’s something that we ask everyone that’s sitting in this chair and I just wondered if you could just give us a general background about why plan.
8:22 What have you guys done? What are you going to do and why do you believe you’re going to win in this space? Sure, so what we have done is we’ve, first of all, we’ve dreamt it up, right? My co-founder and I, we created My Plan from our own pain point and our own use case. We wanted to go out badly one night.
8:42 It was late in the evening, we’re actually hanging out in San Francisco. We wanted to go and listen to some live music and drink some beers and actually not work for once one evening. And we went on Google and we spent an hour on Google And in an hour, we were still on Google. We were not out and about and having fun. And that was just such a kind of natural revelation to us that, geez, this use case is actually broken.
9:06 If I want to go out right now, it’s actually pretty tricky to do that with the current tools. So then we started thinking. Which year was this? That was late 2011. 11, OK.
9:16 Late 2011. So this was in December. So we conceived the idea, essentially, at that point. And it made it then to our whiteboard of other 50 ideas. So that was, you know, it was not a straightforward process for us to come up with it, but then also to pick that one of the, you know, other multiple ideas that we had.
9:32 But it was very clear very quickly that through our MVP testing, what’s called minimum viable product testing, both the consumers and also the event organizers, so promoters, producers and venues that host the shows, everybody was incredibly excited about the proposition. Because connecting a willing customer with an existing seat in real time is hugely value additive to both sides of the equation. Anyhow, so we took that idea from a napkin to a prototype, ultimately, from a prototype to a launched product, from a launched product to a successful product, and now I’ve taken the concept from just being live in London to now also being live in New York, and we’re looking into launching a whole host of more cities, you know, still this year, and in fact in the next, you know, couple of months we’ll see a few more, you know, turn their lights on.
10:21 In terms of what we have done as well is we’ve built an incredible team of exceptional entrepreneurs at YPlan. We’re a team of over 50 right now in just about a year and a half since the point where we actually raised the first dollar of funding. That team is composed of a terrific product and development team which come from the world’s best technology companies like Skype and Google and Microsoft and just are incredibly talented people. Then we have a full marketing team, we have what we call a partner development team, so people from the entertainment industry who have experience and relationships in the space, and then we have an incredible operations team, so that when you actually buy a ticket you’re always getting through the doors. If you have an issue and it’s Saturday night, there’s always somebody to help you out. So having all those components in place, you have to be pretty lucky, I guess, along the way to really be able to recruit the best people and we’ve definitely been lucky with that.
11:29 And the last part of that, why will you win? Is that why? Because you’re set up in such a way where you have all these different pieces handled? It’s that and it’s a singularity of our focus. We don’t want to do anything else. Yplan is a real time going out app, and it works as a proposition.
11:47 It’s hugely helpful to everybody involved in the ecosystem, both the consumers and the event organizers. And if we can do that, and you know, currently we’re live in two cities, but if we can do that in 20 cities very soon, and then 200 cities, and then hopefully, you know, push it into high hundreds of cities, you know, we’ve got a beautiful thing going that essentially enables the entire world to be a lot more spontaneous, you know, and frankly consume a lot more entertainment and events that will enrich their social lives and enable them to have an amazing time with their friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, families, and workmates as well. You’re obviously European, I believe.
12:28 And you started in London, which was probably the closest major city at the time to maybe where you were. But if you could start all over again and put a blank slate out, would you have chosen that city again and why? Absolutely. Indeed, I am European, I’m Lithuanian-born, exactly. I grew up there and my parents still live in Lithuania.
12:48 And so I ended up studying in Germany, studying and working in Germany afterwards. Then I studied in the States for my master’s degree and then came back to Europe and worked in venture capital here in London. So when we started YPlan, actually, I had left my full-time job by then and my co-founder had as well. So we took some time afterwards to basically come up with the idea and then start executing it, but we were both already kind of based in London. And that was, it was a pretty straightforward choice.
13:18 You know, we thought, we thought actually pretty long and hard whether it should be San Francisco or New York or London, but for a whole host of reasons, London was the perfect place to start it. It has a great demographic profile. A lot of young people, a lot of them are super busy. They don’t have time to sift through the clutter. You actually can add a lot of value by curating and by providing a very, very, very convenient experience.
13:40 And so it’s like this thing. You’re just thinking about yourself. Yeah, I’m just like, this is like a description of me and thinking about life while he’s describing this. I mean, Bryce is perfect, right? Because he’s mobile.
13:50 He’s in the demographic. That’s tough at you guys. He doesn’t have a social life. That’s just a good thing. But he’s plugged in.
13:57 You want that 30 to 35-year-old audience that has the smartphone, that uses Halo, that’s happy to use a service like you guys. Oh, absolutely. And where the world is heading, we’re not changing necessarily the habits of the people of the world. The world is becoming more spontaneous, irrespective of what we want or don’t want it to do. People are getting everything now through their phones, they expect it in real time, they have extremely high or extremely low tolerance for poor customer service, they want everything now and they want everything easily accessible.
14:34 And so that’s where the world is heading. And the same is true, you know, in the hotel industry, you know, with players like Hotel Tonight, obviously, you know, doing an amazing job there. Same is true in the, you know, cab and transportation space, right, with the halos of the world, as you rightly mentioned. Same is true in the event space with Y-Plan. And event space is an $80 billion industry globally.
14:54 That’s only sports, you know, theater, music, and cinema. It’s $80 billion. And that almost every other seat is left empty currently. So there’s almost another $80 you could add to, $80 billion you could add to the industry, you know, where we can add to the industry if we do our job well at the end of the day. So the opportunity is compelling, you know, $80 billion is twice more than the GDP of a country that I come from.
15:19 It’s an annual GDP, so it’s a pretty compelling opportunity we’re going after. Okay. Now, you’ve recently crossed the Atlantic, and we see many companies cross the Atlantic, but it’s usually coming the other way. And we spoke to, you know, Courtney Boyd Myers about this. We’ve spoken a lot about taking the business model of America and transferring it to Europe, how they can fail, how they can not.
15:38 But we don’t see very often someone taking a UK business model and going there. And I was wondering if it’s something you thought long and hard of, is there something you decided to tackle it in a different way so you wouldn’t get into stuck with a lot of the problems that have happened in the past with companies trying to go west? I would say that going east or going west is probably equally difficult if you try to do it on a remote control type basis.
16:00 So trying to set up shop in London if you’re a San Francisco company is as difficult as it is to do it the other way around. There’s all sorts of differences, particularly cultural nuances, the nuances of managing the team effectively, differences in the market, local competition, and all things like that. So the difference in approach that we took ultimately was that we said, OK, if we want to go live in New York, my co-founder and I, and also some other members of the team, we’ll have to spend a lot of time in New York.
16:30 And so what that means is now, you know, people ask, you know, where I live and, you know, my answer is, you know, I live in MBA flight, you know, 1518, which is, you know, London, New York. So that means, you know, we’re really taking it seriously. And you know, having us on the ground actually helps not only to transfer the culture of the company and kind of make sure that we transfer all the key and important things that we value at YPlan internally, but also that we really invest the effort and the resources into getting it right.
17:00 And if something is not right, we’re fixing it in real time, and we’re letting none of that slip through the cracks. So that’s really, really important. And you can see multiple European companies actually do a really good job of crossing the Atlantic. Look at guys like Spotify, for example, have done a phenomenal job. CityMapper, as well, from London, not a very large team, but incredibly talented and done a great job of launching New York, most recently Paris now too.
17:29 And so there are ways to do it successfully certainly, but it does require a certain amount of effort and typically a pretty large one. I think it makes a big statement when you go, because it shows the investors, it shows the employees, and it shows the customers that like you’re really serious about this. Yeah. You’re not just sending someone to go open up the frontier office. Yeah.
17:47 Well, and as you rightly say, we just take it very seriously. Which is not to say that we don’t take London seriously at all, which is why I’m sitting with you here in London, right? So we spend a lot of time in London as well in making sure that we continue capitalizing on the incredible momentum. Yes, 20% of the Londoners have the WiPlant app, but 80% still don’t. And we also just recently launched the Android app.
18:12 Like a true entrepreneur. Yeah, but seriously, we only just launched the Android app. And so the penetration there still has a long way to go to its potential. So there’s a lot of things that we still need to do in order to really optimize on the potential that we have. So we wanna make sure that we spend a lot of time in London too.
18:31 So as you can imagine, there’s a lot of miles, care miles being accumulated. Yeah, go. So I’ve got a couple of questions I wanna sort of dive in. Gotta buy the business card? Well, I do like these shiny business cards.
18:44 We had a little Moo American Psycho-esque business card where I gave Richard my business card and he said, well, just settle down son. I’ve got equal thickness business card Well, yours is equally cool, I think. I don’t know, I really like the other side. Mine’s got ducks, but you also got egg shelling. We’re gonna have a duck circle.
19:01 Some street art here. Ooh, check it out. That’s all cool. And then pictures of us in the studio. Oh, you got two-sided.
19:08 Yeah, now we’re compared to us. I’m just not sweating now. My apologies. I think Ritas has it with the embossed. He’s got it with the embossed, and he’s at the eggshell tiling.
19:15 Nice little touch. If you’re not familiar with it. That’s our designers, by the way. Shout out to designers. Yeah, yeah, give a shout out to designers everywhere.
19:20 That’s a lovely cut. from the movie American Psycho where all of these guys compare cards as if it’s probably the most important thing in the universe. And they all start sweating when they’re like the different fonts. I have a couple of questions about Y-Plan. So one of the interesting things you just said was that sometimes 20-50% of seats are left untaken at events and that’s the gap that you’re feeling.
19:45 As someone who lives in London, let’s take live music for example because that’s obviously I think everyone can relate to going to live music gigs. One of the problems I always have in London is there are so many services kind of saying, OK, the gig’s coming, or there’s this band’s touring, and tickets are on sale. And I always seem to miss out. I was curious where the Y plan is tapping into that kind of, is it like late stage tickets? Or how do they, that’s one of my first question, which is how that issue of, I always find this issue with anything that the hassle of trying find tickets that aren’t sold out is often a big deal.
20:23 Just to clarify that a little bit, everything you see on Yplan is live and we have access to the event. So, what you see you can buy. If you don’t see it, you can buy. Very simple, right? So, what we try to do is obviously make sure that you can access the best and coolest events happening in London.
20:41 And that will be a Will.i.am concert one day and then Beyonce concert the other day. And then a third day it would be punch drunk, and a fourth day it may be something equally quirky and cool in shortage. But it’s very important for us that we don’t become a listing service, just like showing you everything that’s out there. Everything you can see you can buy on Wyplan. And the other point that you mentioned is that a lot of the things seem to sell out, which is true, I guess, in about 2% of the cases, indeed.
21:13 The other 98% of the cases, what may happen is the concert goes on sale, the initial allocation for the on sale may sell out, but there will be more tickets released as we can get closer to the show. And so what we tap into is that opportunity to offer the kind of true, true, true last minute seats to our customers, right? That’s interesting. Yeah, that was what I was kind of getting at, which you mentioned earlier, current booking systems are still old legacy systems and they’re geared towards forwards, then you just stop a day or two.
21:46 Well, yeah, and if you think about if you’re a music promoter, you would want as many tickets to sell as early as you can because that is good for your business and that is perfectly fine. Now, we at WIPEN just realized that actually there’s natural tendency for some people, not everyone, but for some people, particularly who are not super fans of a particular band, They may or may not go and they’re not willing to commit six months in advance to may or may not going but paying money for it. They may, in all likelihood, go if you offer them that opportunity two days before or the day off, which is where YPlans’ proposition really comes to life.
22:26 I tell you why I read this. I got back from New York and Toronto and I found an envelope on my desk and it was a ticket to see the national, which I had bought six months beforehand knowing it would sell out and then turn out I was in New York and Toronto completely forgot that and you missed it completely missed it if you don’t know why I plan because I didn’t why I planned but that dovetails nicely into my second question which is a rather business which is it’s why plan gives you sort of based on your kind of things that you’re into gives you sort of what ten to fifteen kind of curated suggestions of things you can do how does that work on the back end when what I would imagine if we were looking at it like a funnel is an incredible thing that London New York an incredible amount at this end and about this much per individual user that’s tailored.
23:09 How do you source that content? How do you filter that content? And I’m particularly interested in this in terms of going back to Brides’ request when you started, because to me, two guys trying to collate all of the events in a night every single day in a single month. So that’s not how Y-Plan works, actually. It’s probably good to clarify that.
23:29 We don’t scrape information from other sites. We don’t collate all the information from other sources. My plan actually is a marketplace. We work directly with concert promoters, with theater producers, and with the venues who work directly with them. And so we get access to events directly from the organizer of the event.
23:48 Very laborious. I can tell you that. I believe you. And very slow. But we have our ways of speeding it up and making sure that we do an incredibly good job to them whenever we work directly with event partners.
24:01 Which means basically that we’re building a very large kind of relationship base in every city that we launch. And then ultimately, if you fast forward in Wireplan into a couple of years down the line, we will be able to access an equally large pool of events, except we have a transactional access. We can actually allow you to go to anything. And then, so currently we really kind of focus on curation, more so than personalization, But increasingly more, the list is getting more and more personalized to you, which means we can have on the back end running 500 events in London, but you’re only seeing 15 that are really, really, really good fits for you.
24:41 And so this is a version of the world that we’re heading towards, obviously, because we think the days of long listings and kind of long browsing and pretty exhaustive figuring out process, we think all of that is over. These things are smart enough to know a lot about you and to be able to suggest a lot to you if you put in the right software onto the phone and the right software in this case is what I plan. Let me find out about New York a bit. You’ve been over there now for, what, nine months on the ground and live about three or four months?
25:13 Well, yeah, we launched in late 2013. What have you learned about New York, about the Americans, and how does that city compare to London when it comes to selling your product to an audience. Sure. I mean, New Yorkers are equally spontaneous or even more spontaneous than Londoners. It’s a very, very social city.
25:34 Everybody’s out in about three, four nights a week. It’s just a custom. People are out and about. They eat out. They go to music shows.
25:43 There’s a big, obviously, Broadway kind of show community there. And there’s just a lot going on. The clubbing scene is just amazing, etc. So the types of events that people go to differ a little bit in New York versus London. Not a huge amount, but they do differ a little bit.
25:59 For instance, in the summertime, they actually have a lot of sun as opposed to London, which has less sun, which means rooftop parties is just a huge part of the scene in the entire summer. So you’ve got to have that sort of supply as part of the proposition if you are to to cater to the local customer, ultimately, right? So there’s a lot of kind of subtle nuances like that. And other than that, we find that the demographics is similar, it’s, as you rightly mentioned, is 20 to 35-year-olds who are very socially active and who go out a lot anyway.
26:35 And so with Waipline, they just go out to new things and see new places, new shows, as opposed to just going around the corner and grabbing a beer or going to the same restaurant know, for dinner, they may end up going to something, you know, to a more special place and have a wine tasting, right, with their loved one and have a great night out, you know, that way. What surprised you most about New York and what didn’t surprise you? I don’t know if it really kind of surprises but, you know, New Yorkers are very discerning as customers.
27:06 They’re very quick to love if they really like something and they’re pretty quick to drop as well if they don’t like a particular service. So you have to really go out of your way in order to find a way to please the customer. Thankfully our entire business model is built exactly like that. Customers expect a great looking app, they expect an easy transaction and then they expect fantastic customer service through and through. And thankfully this is all the key pillars that our company is ultimately built on.
27:39 So I think the team in New York has been just super ready for this sort of reception in the market, and we’ve delivered in every single instance. Our reviews on the US App Store are equally strong as they are in the UK App Store. In the UK App Store, it’s like 95% five-star reviews, basically, that we have. That’s precisely because of that, our religious focus on customer experience. What are you foreseeing problems in New York that actually didn’t manifest?
28:06 Were you expecting A, X, Y, and Z to be a problem, and then it actually wasn’t as bad? Zero on question, Ryan. I’m paranoid about everything. I was thinking, this and that will go wrong, and we’ve never transacted in dollars, we only transact in pounds, and how is this gonna look like, or that’s gonna look like, or people are gonna go get through the doors when they show up, is it gonna be valid? All of those things.
28:27 But thankfully, we actually didn’t have any of those major issues. So, I mean, there’s been small bumps along the way, of course, but nothing that would actually prevent us to say that New York has been a super, super successful launch. The momentum in New York has actually been interestingly stronger than what we’d seen in London in the early days, so we’re very encouraged by the first few months of being live there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there was the question I wanted to ask you earlier before we started going, but you’re going to the West Coast, and obviously part of your business plan, as you’ve said in the past, is to be in 200 or 300 cities someday.
29:00 So you’re going West Coast. What do you need to make sure you do and then that you don’t do when you start expanding exponentially? Yeah, I was curious about it. What’s the research process, like going from London to New York, as Brian said, how long do you spend on the ground? How do you get your feel?
29:15 And that’s an obvious move. But then from New York, where you go, that’s not obvious. It’s not obvious. And none of those decisions are obvious, frankly. So what we try to do is we try to identify what are the key ingredients for success in order for our market to be successful.
29:29 And the simple kind of way to put it is that we have two sides of the market. We deal with the event partners, promoters, producers, venues, on the one hand. And we deal with the consumer customers, on the other hand. So what you want to do is that you want to really understand the landscape on both sides and see where your value proposition can bring the most value to both sides of the market. So for instance, New York, just very well-fitting.
29:55 Lots of young people, similar to London, frankly, very busy, very social, highly engaged in trying out new things and new events, and then everybody has smartphones. And population density. And population density, yeah, accessible city, right? That’s a good starting point. And then on the supply side, there is a lot going on, right?
30:16 There’s just a lot of events, there’s sports teams, there’s music events, there’s theater land that’s pretty active, of course, there’s big comedy scene, clubbing, all that. So you look at all these factors and you try to make judgment calls basically for where you believe that market is going to fit with your proposition ultimately the best. And then going west, we’ve mentioned previously that we’re looking to launch several cities there, which is not to say that we won’t do more in the east coast or that we won’t do more in the UK.
30:47 It’s just a question of when and a question of managerial and execution resources that we have at our company. And thankfully, when things are going so well, it’s actually reasonably easy, I would say, and we’re really lucky to be in that position to recruit the absolute best people to join our company, which means pretty soon we will have the managerial resources to be pushing on a lot more fronts than we are right now. So what you will see is an accelerating pace of new city launches, and at some point I’m hoping we’ll reach the pace where every month we’re launching multiple cities.
31:19 And so that’s when it starts to get really, really interesting. Imagine you have your Y plan on your phone, and you just hopped on a Eurostar, you just arrive in Paris, you just stick out your phone, fired up Y-Plan, and you’re a jazz lover, let’s say, and it shows you the coolest three jazz gigs going on in Paris tonight, and you can go with just two tabs, you just need to show up then. And then you hop onto a flight and you find yourself in New York, and it’s the same thing.
31:45 And then you hop onto another flight, you find yourself in Detroit, and it’s another thing. Then you go back to Australia, you land in Sydney, and it says, well, actually, tonight You can go to these amazing jasmine’s and by the way There’s these other cool things that you haven’t thought of before yeah And then it becomes really really really interesting because we’ve just allowed you to explore the world like you could never do It before and this is where why plan is heading you know where why plan is not a ticketing service is a real-time Discovery service your social life on demand and you’ll be in California this year Yes, definitely, San Francisco, LA something like that We’ll see. Several cities go live in there. Yeah. No, I mean, my hometown. There’s nothing from San Diego. Yeah. There’s enough going on down there. Right. Well, there’s definitely enough going on. And you know, in San Francisco and LA. So good. You know, this is silicone real. And so we like to get real and ask a couple tough questions. I hope you have one. But I have one for you. You know, it’s one thing to have your app on, say, 20% of the people’s phones in London, which is a big improvement. And I have to confess, I had the Y plan app on my phone for a long time.
32:51 I remember you were running ads in the tube and stuff, but you know in the last few days We’re actually started using it, and I was like okay. Wow. I was like Bryce I really need to be getting out more yeah, and using this thing How do you get people once they have the app to use that mm-hmm that trigger going and it’s a it is indeed a tough Question because there is no one answer to that question So what what you’re referring to is you know actual kind of active usage of the service You know thankfully there is a very natural kind of network effect there like if if Bryce were to take tell you, hey, you know, Yplan has been really cool, just went out and saw, you know, this very cool gig. And then I told you the next day and another friend told you the next day, I guarantee that you will go to a Yplan event in the next couple of weeks. So having the more active users we have, the more new active users we get. And we know that once you’ve gone out with Yplan, you’re in love. You’re in absolute love because it was easy, it was convenient, you just showed up with your phone, you got in, likely, you got a preferential treatment as well, you got like a great seat or you know something else and so from there on you’re a devoted lover. So there is a little bit lover of WiPlant and and so for us kind of the bigger the bigger barrier is to is to get people to use WiPlant for the first time. And there’s really no no easy answer to
34:06 That, is what we’re doing hasn’t been done before. It’s mobile only focused on real-time events, it’s bloody difficult to get it right. So what you have to do is you have to really focus, figure out the use cases, create trust for your customers by always delivering on the service and once enough of your friends have gotten a great service, you will start using it as well. So the simple answer to that is the more active users that we have, the more active users we get on the back of that.
34:36 And if someone goes to a cool event, they’ll tell their friend about it and they’ll say, how’d you get on that? Yeah. So like the events almost promote you as opposed to getting the sandwich, I got this great sandwich. You get it. Sorry.
34:46 That works in your favor. Yeah. Absolutely. Bryce, what am I missing here? I suppose for a question for, I guess, some of the listeners and the viewers who are thinking about starting something.
34:58 So how did you open those first doors? So you deal directly, as you said, with the companies, the promoters, the venues, the entertainment companies. You’ve got two young guys who are coming in saying, we’ve built this app and here’s what it’s going to do. How do you get them to open that door? How did you start those first moves?
35:16 To get someone to just give you a shot, trial out, send things? It’s easy. Just go there, knock on the doors, they open, they sign on the contract. It was actually very, very painful initially. But to be honest, I think one thing that in retrospect we did extremely well is Vic and I, Vic is my co-founder and CTO of the company, and I run the business side of the business as a CEO.
35:38 What we did is we surrounded ourselves with people from the entertainment industry in our team. And that was a game changer basically, right? To have folks who really understand and have been doing this very similar job for a while and they have the connections and they have the understanding, they understand the sensitivities and what needs to be done in order to be successful with that, has been instrumental. Just like it has been instrumental for us to get the best designers and developers to get the app to look the way it does, just like it was instrumental for us to get the marketing team in place that actually knew how to acquire, engage and convert customers when you’re only live on a mobile device.
36:20 That is pretty tricky. There’s not a lot of ways to do it. You have to really understand it. So the simple answer to that is surround yourself with the best professionals that you can unless your own network and your own skill set naturally leads you to being successful in a particular, you know, business or, you know, start-up idea that you just ventured out to do. And did you find these people, did you start reaching out to these people before you got your first kind of seed funding or how early on in the…
36:44 In parallel. Everything was happening in parallel. Basically we, once Vic and I tested the concept and we saw that it has wings and not only kind of wings but actually big wings. We started doing multiple things at the same time, kind of in a very focused way but it was like two or three big work streams. One was the funding because this is a model that is just expensive to build.
37:04 It’s a marketplace model, it requires you to have the events in order to have the customers. If you have the customers, you’ll get more events and like it’s a chicken and egg at its most beautiful and more ugly, I should say, probably form because it is a full-on chicken and egg problem. And the other work stream was obviously to continue to validate the thesis while we were fundraising so that we could continue to show the investors that this idea has legs.
37:33 How did you do that? How did you do that early stage testing? The very first stage of testing was that’s why we teamed up with Vic to start up a company together. Vic’s background is in engineering and computer science. He’s a developer himself.
37:52 He studied artificial intelligence and robotics basically for his master’s degree, the smartest guy I’d ever known. me was pretty much a no-brainer when we decided to team up together to have this sort of complementary skill set to what was my strength, which was the business side of the business. So Vic basically developed a prototype that was not until a few months after our early testing, but Vic ended up developing a prototype in only three weeks, which was an app where you could see events and you could say book now.
38:27 You couldn’t actually transact on the app. There was no financial element to it. Once you said book now, we would send you a PayPal link later on, and you have to pay us basically with PayPal. And then also when we saw that somebody had booked, we would run ourselves to the ticket office, buy the ticket and hand deliver it to the customer. Those were the most insane couple of months when we were running this as a small, small, small group, like small manageable group of mostly friends of friends or like people we vaguely knew.
38:57 But we gave them the app, and we said, hey, listen. We’re trialing this interesting idea, and we think it can be massive. Would you like to try it out? And people were interested and excited. They didn’t know us personally, but yeah, whatever.
39:07 Sounds interesting. And we gave it to people, and we thought people were going crazy. They were using it. They were opening it up at two in the morning just to see what’s on for the next day, what just came onto the app the next day. And then they would wake up, and they would actually start buying tickets that we actually didn’t have access for.
39:22 So that was fun. And those couple of months were one of the longest hours, I guess, that we had to put in, obviously. Creating a marketplace for just two people is a lot. But that was our way to validate the thesis. And meanwhile, I was sleeping on the couch.
39:40 And basically, because I didn’t have an apartment at the time, I just turned in in order to save money. But that meant that we spent a lot of quality time actually thinking and developing and testing, iterating and learning from that. And we would feed it back straight to the investors that we were talking to, and they just saw how much progress was happening. And ultimately, we closed the first investment round in July of 2012, in late July 2012. So that was until August, September, October, and in October we went live basically to a small group of real world customers, and then in November we went live to the entire London.
40:19 In four months, we built the app, we built the back-end, we built the marketing plan, and we built the supply relationships and everything else that goes with the business. That’s just not very easy to do. You have to be really focused. You have to have an incredible team, and that’s what I always attribute my plan success to is the team, because you can be as visionary as you want, but if you don’t have great team in your sitting there with you in these late hours and cranking away and doing everything it takes in order to succeed, well, if you have that, then you’re on to a winner, likely.
40:55 And if you don’t, then basically it’s tricky. And didn’t Stephen Fry famously endorse you at one point? He did. And that was so much fun. Speaking of viral marketing, this is really interesting because we were talking before we started recording about Richter’s card, not a creepy way to bring the card again.
41:10 We’re talking about viral marketing. Viral marketing here. And the button, too. So you won’t be able to see this, dear viewers, but at the bottom of Richard’s card here, it says, for $10 credit, use my code, which I won’t read out. It’s fine.
41:24 But we’ll post it on the website. But viral marketing, and it reminded me about Yplan because for a lot of consumers, and I will count myself in this thing, Yplan almost felt like it kind of came out of nowhere and just rocketing. It was on the tubes. as Brian mentioned, Stephen Fry tweets about it. I mean, how did that come to pass and what- That’s a very good question.
41:47 It seems like you have a real focus on, you’ve mentioned Word of Mouth already, a real focus on viral marketing. Is that intentional? How did you shape that? Because I think that’s a quite interesting part of your app and the fame of your app. Yeah. Well, it is intentional because Mother is the, or sort of necessity is the Mother of innovation, right, I guess.
42:05 Yeah. When we raised our seed round, it looked like a large seed round, but it really wasn’t for the marketplace business that we were building, which meant that our marketing budget was actually miniscule. It was a really, really small marketing budget, so we had to come up with ways to market and to drive user adoption and user growth, other than just your more traditional marketing challenge. Even tube advertising, frankly, didn’t happen until late March or April, which is when we were about to close our next funding round.
42:35 We had to be exceptionally scrappy early on. And when Stephen Fry endorsed us, it was fantastic. We had just launched. We were live, it was December the 17th. We had launched publicly on the 26th of November of 2012.
42:51 We had just been live for like three weeks. And as it happens, Stephen Fry, who is an absolute tech guru, who is an actor himself, who is one of the, you know, smartest individuals I’d ever had the pleasure of interacting. You know, he just fit the bill perfectly and he absolutely got what we were doing. And so that message that, you know, folks in London are trying to change the world and helping in a way, you know, partly the profession that he’s in as well, that just kind of resonated, you know, with him completely.
43:22 So when we got like, we weren’t expecting this tweet to come out at all, but we actually We had a tea with him, like we got a connection with Stephen Fry in the first couple of weeks. So they approached us and then we said, okay, sure, let’s meet for tea. We met for tea. We talked about technology for an hour, just where the world is heading. He’s an incredible guy.
43:43 And then next morning, I was just sitting there, you know, doing some work on my laptop and I hear my co-founder shouting from the other room, I think Stephen Fry just tweeted about us. I’m like, no, this cannot be true. and then I’m looking there at live download numbers and it’s just like this. It basically broke through like all the, you know, all the kind of records that we’d said before. And that was definitely a good day, you know, but I would highlight though that, you know, those sorts of things, and again, this is a great endorsement, right?
44:13 Fantastic to have, you know, a support really from someone who is just, you know, an icon, right? And also the country. For our international people, the most followed person in the UK on Twitter. Yeah, he is, right? He is like the quintessential representative of Britain.
44:28 But he’s also a massive tech buff, which is really interesting. The audience he gets is so varied. And he’s got over 6.5 million followers now on Twitter, which is powerful. But the half-life of a tweet effect is about half an hour. So the effect basically just wanes out immediately.
44:49 And so you’re left with a very good memory, basically, right? And a quote. And a quote. Of course. Remember that time when Stephen Fry tweeted about us?
44:59 Yeah, it was 20 minutes ago. Yeah, exactly. No, but in all fairness, endorsements like that are phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. And when you get that organically like the way it happened there, just take a deep breath and say, okay, God’s helping us out here along the way. What was amazing about that is it then generated press coverage.
45:16 That was the interesting thing I remember seeing, which was like he sent a tweet out and only to download, journalists started writing about this app from London that Stephen and Fry has suddenly said is worth checking out is really cool, which is kind of interesting. Yeah, very, very, very interesting side effect there. Yeah. And then you have to get back to work for what you do, which is providing the great service, right? I mean, I’ve had those moments where you retweeted by Russell Brand and you’re like, yay.
45:37 And then it’s like, okay, now you get back to work with what we’re doing. Yeah. You know, there’s this famous quote from Steve Jobs. There was some incredible news that came out of Apple. You know, they had like the best year ever and like everybody’s cheering.
45:53 Everybody’s super, super happy. And there’s this famous email that he sends to all at applecorp.com basically, which says, I’m sure you all saw the news. Now back to work, Steve. So you know, it’s not entirely like that at Weipline, you know, we do celebrate our successes because it’s just, you know, the hours are long as they are and the work’s hard as it is. But definitely the culture is that of, okay, awesome.
46:18 What’s next? Yeah, just like their leader. I can say just a few more questions your opinion of the state of London tech startup You know, what are we doing right? And what do we need to do differently? Mm-hmm overall the scene has evolved at an incredible pace as I’m sure you’ll agree, you know the last several years have been have been fantastic, right?
46:40 There’s if you look at it, it is impressive how many? industry leading startups They’re, you know, emerged basically just in the last few years, you know, look at the likes of halo look at the likes of huddle For example, right, you know, I would put why plan in the same category, you know city mapper guys You know several other companies that are literally just redefining your Shazam for that matter You know didn’t come out like in the last, you know, couple of years But really emerges a leader in that space like they’re just you know fully, you know and legitimately global companies redefining redefining the entire industry that they’re in. So I think it’s been a very, very positive development in the last several years in terms of the ecosystem here in London.
47:27 I think we here in London used to struggle quite a bit from kind of lack of competitive financing for startups, so the early investment scene in particular, so angel investment and seed type investment. Because what companies need at the early stage is, yes, cash, but also just smart advice. And smart advice means that somebody who’s experienced and somebody who has gone through it is genuinely helping out the new breed of entrepreneurs to succeed. And they will do everything.
47:58 And they will invest the long hours. And they will make the connections. And they will proactively suggest. And they will help to catapult that early, early, early idea and a few founders and kind of the early team into something that’s a little bit more substantive, right, and has some traction, you know, is growing. So, I think we used to, and it’s a little bit of a kind of virtuous circle, right?
48:17 If you have successful companies that have successful IPOs or be successfully acquired, you know, then individuals from those companies over time become angels or partners in VC funds who then smartly fund a new breed of entrepreneurs. And it just keeps on kind of coming back. Plus, you know, they said, obviously, an example, right? Especially to the younger generation, you know, folks who maybe are still at school, they need role models. They need the Steve Jobs’ and the Bill Gates’ in order to say, you know, mama, I want to be an entrepreneur.
48:48 If you ask a 12-year-old if he wants to be an entrepreneur, does he know what an entrepreneur actually means? Well, in the States, everybody knows Steve Jobs and everybody knows Bill Gates. And I’m not saying they’re the only two entrepreneurs, but they definitely have several of those iconic names that are household names and that necessarily inspire an entire generation to really think about, you know, entrepreneurship being our career. So I would say that, you know, and we do have success stories here in the UK, quite a few of those.
49:18 So I would say that we should definitely celebrate that a lot more. You know, Brent Hoberman, for example, lastminute.com, right, a bunch of other entrepreneurs that built like real successful businesses, you know, Zoopla guys, for example, who’s usually example just eat hopefully you know we’ll go as we also in the news recently we’ll have a successful IPO you know still in the first half of this year like there is a lot of success to be shared and I think it needs to be shared and generously right and that will inspire an entire new breed of entrepreneurs essentially to kind of you know just just just just start running the business or starting the businesses and then and then you have you know a smart ecosystem you know of capital and advice supporting them so So closing that loop is very important.
50:02 And then ultimately, I think, fostering the exit ecosystem. I was just telling before the interview that I think Zoopla and Just Eat, they’re thinking of going IPO in London. Had they been both American companies, they could have done the IPO on NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange a long time ago. Why? It’s just that sort of culture.
50:28 It encourages earlier stage technology companies to go IPO and there will be demand, there will be institutional investors that will willingly invest in those slightly younger maybe companies than the European investors would accept are kind of healthy for the stock market. But a stock market is or should be a viable exit option for a lot of the companies. And in Europe, I don’t think it is. If you look at the percentage of venture capital portfolio investments that are being acquired by larger companies vis-a-vis that go IPO, that ratio is enormously skewed towards M&A and not IPO.
51:11 So encouraging the public markets to embrace the technology companies, but also encourage the larger, more successful technology companies to have an incentive to look for potential acquisitions in the UK. That is very healthy for the ecosystem, ultimately, because you need to start, grow, succeed, and then float or sell, rinse, repeat. And that is what’s good for the startup ecosystem. And I think the government has been doing a lot of good work there and really hope that they will continue with all the good efforts to really revive and revitalize the Silicon Roundabout area and making sure there is entrepreneur-friendly tax incentives, and there’s all sorts of IR&D tax credits for technology companies.
51:56 All of that is good. I just think we need to continue doing what we’re doing, plus do a lot more in order to really support the different bits of the ecosystem. Very well said. Last question, and we ask everyone sitting here in that chair the same question. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old young man that was yourself and give him a little bit of advice, what would you tell him?
52:18 This is a great question. I think when I was trying to think what exactly I was doing when I was 20 and I was applying to business school actually for an MBA program at 20 and I got in when I was 21. And so I think that was the right decision certainly at the time. What piece of advice would I give to myself? I would say to definitely not try to reinvent the wheel with every step that I take and actually try and draw inspiration, but particularly knowledge, from people who have been there before.
52:50 So it’s a lot better to talk to two people than to read three books. If you’re not sure of how to do a particular thing, go talk to people who have done it before. They’ll give you advice that’s a million times more valuable than what you will find on Wikipedia or by buying a textbook. So, I would just say, you know, even more, you know, interaction and kind of be brave about it. Like, if you’re young but you’re very keen and you know where you want to go but you have no idea for how to get there, well, find people who have done that before and they will be more than willing to help you out.
53:22 So I guess I would be even more kind of focused on, you know, getting sound advice from entrepreneurs in my case because I knew I’m going to be an entrepreneur at some point. Again, I had my first startup when I was 14 but that was a very small scale kind of business in Lithuania, which is where I grew up. But I knew I’m going to be back to doing bigger things in life. So I would have gotten a lot more advice at that time. And you didn’t?
53:46 You were the Wikipedia guy more than the advice guy? I did a little bit of both, but I didn’t realize just how important the advice part is. I lucked into a lot of the advice. And some of it was topical, and some of it was not, because I just didn’t focus necessarily enough on that. Okay.
54:04 Advice you’ve ever received? The best advice I’d ever received. Somebody, so when I was starting my, you know, the company were actually, you know, the flow was I left my job in order, like my full-time job in venture capital to start my own company. And before I did that, I did talk to several entrepreneurs and I was saying, you know, what is the main thing that I should be kind of focused on or concerned about? And somebody said, you know, you really got to find the right co-founder if you’re to do it alone think twice and you know if you can’t find the right co-founder and I then end up scratching my head and you’re really thinking hard for a long time who that co-founder should be and turns out it’s the guy that I know the best actually and is my best friend anyway so it was you know when it when you actually I realized that it was very very liberating and and everything else kind of just fell into places but it wasn’t as obvious before I realized that this is the one thing that I need to get Okay, last part of that question, to the 20-year-old that’s listening to us now, you know, all over the world, west coast of US or in China, what advice do you give them if they want to, you know, grow up and be like you to create something like Y-Plan or get involved in this sector?
55:13 I would say, you know, if you want to create your own business, there is really no time that’s too early to do that. You know, if you are at a university right now doing your, you know, undergrad program or your master’s program or whatever, start testing ideas, you know, don’t just theorize, testing ideas, develop the most simple website you can, go to Unbounce.com or another splash page website, just launch it out there, drive some traffic from Google for $50, and see what happens, see how those people behave who come to your website. If you are talking about a different sort of business, well figure out how else, like if it’s offline or whatever you want to do, just figure out how else you could get some market feedback and market input, because what you think doesn’t matter, what matters is what the market thinks ultimately.
56:00 And so it’s a lot better to spend very little time and get a lot of feedback from the market as opposed to, you know, spend a very long time theorizing and maybe developing a kind of, you know, first product and you launch it in three years only to realize that nobody wants it. So if you want to be successful, I guess, you know, a very good way to do that is to fail early as opposed to work for a very long time and then fail late. So that would be kind of one piece of advice.
56:26 Advice. The market is always right. How do people get a hold of you? Are you on Twitter? Are you the kind of guy that responds to emails? What’s the best way?
56:33 Yep. I am on Twitter. It’s at readisfit, V-I-T. And you can also ping me an email, which is my first name at yplanapp.com. So R-Y-T-I-S at yplanapp.com. I read them all.
56:46 I’m out of capacity to respond to all of them. But if it’s topical and relevant for the company, it will always be forwarded to the right person in the company. Okay, and you’re on Android now, and iPhone, they can download your app simply, right? Absolutely. You just go to the respective, you know, App Store, you know, Play Store, and you find the app by typing whyplan.
57:06 I just got a new Android phone, I’m going to get the new Android version. Well, I’ve been messing with it lately, I really like the app, I already see things I need to be taking my girlfriend to, and if she saw the things I saw, she would be like, why didn’t you take me to that? Which is how you mentioned Ashton Kutcher before, which is how he got involved with whyplan, because he was browsing around one evening and he was like, hey Mila, and Mila Kunis, his girlfriend, she was filming a movie here in London, he’s like, well, how about we go to Royal Albert Hall today?
57:34 And she’s like, how do you know, like, is there anything going on? And she’s like, well, no, there’s this cool event going on. There’s a classical musical concert at Royal Albert Hall. She was game and they went out and that’s how they discovered Y plan and that’s how he got involved ultimately in the company as well. So go ahead and do suggest some of those ideas to your girlfriend before she did to you.
57:55 I like it. We can ask if we’re going to get Ashton Kutcher and Steven Varela on the show, I think. Yeah, I see. Just make a call. Just make a call.
58:02 Does tomorrow work? Yeah. Let’s talk about why play. Awesome, guys. Our time is up.
58:07 That was a seriously packed hour full of information. So thanks so much for coming on and giving us the story. Thanks very much for having me. I’m very bullish on this whole story. I love it.
58:14 I can’t wait until you guys are in 200 cities. It boggles the mind. But then again, why not? Why, why, why, why, why? All good.
58:22 If you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can watch our faces on YouTube channel, Silicon Reel. If you’re watching this live, thank you so much for watching the fully produced version of this. It’ll be out in about a week. We’re on Twitter at Silicon Reel. As we say, it’s about the people.
58:37 It always just shows when we have people like this talking. So we’re very lucky. We are lucky. Bryce, thanks for coming back. Thanks for having me back.
58:43 Hope we’re going to see more of you in the next few months. You are. You won’t be able to get rid of me soon. All right guys, all the best to you and thanks so much for being here. Thank you very much.
58:50 Thank you. Take care. Cheers.
