We’re hugely excited to share with you, for the first time, our quarterly goals!
Here at Timbuktu, we have always been big advocates of being as open and transparent about our company strategy and aspirations as possible. We believe the benefits of people understanding our mission, and perhaps being able to help, far outweigh any possible risks.
We see this as being the next step along the path of transparency.
We hope that sharing our goals will give you an insight into the inner workings of Timbuktu and give you some background on the decisions we make, the new products that we’re working on, and developments to our longer-term strategy.
Our mission as a company is to empower curious travellers to experience the far-flung corners of the world. Our short-term focus is to revolutionise safari travel, inspiring and enabling travellers to easily plan their own trip, their way.
Thank you for your continued support and I hope you enjoy reading our progress in Q1 and our goals for the next three months ahead.
Happy travelling,
Johnny
Q1 2019 Progress
In Q1, we set the following three goals. They were our compass for the work we prioritised in the three months and following is a brief snapshot of how well we did:
1. Build a product that our travellers love
From regular customer interviews, we have learnt first-hand how people use our product and how we can improve. One of the key learnings was the need for people to better understand how to get from point A to point B. We’ve therefore concentrated on building transfers, allowing people to easily decide whether they want to travel by plane, boat or landrover based on travel time and cost. We’re almost there and plan to be launching this exciting new feature in the next few weeks.
We measured our customer happiness and how we can further improve the product with a customer survey. It was sent to both past customers and to new users on the site. We achieved a Net Promoter Score of 83 with 86% of people saying the likelihood of recommending Timbuktu to a friend was 9 or 10 out of 10. The main benefits people saw from having used Timbuktu was the ability to plan their own trip with useful information, but with the added support and advice from our safari experts.
When asked how can we improve Timbuktu, people suggested having clearer information around transfer details, improving the level of communication, and expanding the product out of Africa.
This gave us a warm fuzzy feeling, validating that Timbuktu is resonating with our customers and we’re on track with our product road-map and overall long term mission.
This methodology was inspired by Rahul Vohra (founder of Super Human) in his podcast – thank you Fabrice from Compass Venture Capital for the recommendation!
2. Increase the number of people travelling to Africa
In order to achieve our long-term mission, we decided to focus on growth. This will enable us to focus on building the best product for our customers and empower as many travellers across the globe to experience the remote corners of Africa.
We launched an automated website chat-bot in order to help our visitors find the right tools for their stage of trip planning. This has also increased the capacity of the sales team as more of our visitors are using our website planner as opposed to asking our sales team for help.
We launched various sales automations such as email responses to new leads, increasing the capacity of the sales team and therefore reducing our costs.
We also set up an automated welcome email explaining why we started Timbuktu, how to use the website, and our guide to planning your own safari.
It has been a great quarter for bookings, with year-on-year revenue growth of 1.8X and reaching a landmark of 10,000 trips created on Timbuktu!
3. Prove a scalable growth channel
We launched three new versions of The Wizard allowing travellers to instantly find their perfect trip based on their interests. The Wizard asks travellers a series of quick and easy questions (that our safari experts would ask guests anyway) and with some of our safari magic, it creates a series of perfect trip ideas.
We also launched a new version of our Routes and Lodges with enhanced side-filtering, making it easier for people to create their perfect trip.
We’ve now proven Google Adwords as a scalable traction channel, which is a massive milestone for us.
Our Q2 Goals
We feel like we’re on track and moving in the right direction with our Q2 goals and as a result, are keeping our first two company goals for this coming quarter the same as Q1. They are very much our guiding principles to keep the whole company focused on the highest priority objectives that can move the needle and have the biggest impact.
Here is an overview of what we are going to be working on for the next three months…
1. Making Timbuktu the best safari planning experience possible
We’re on a mission to make planning a safari as fun and easy as possible. We are therefore dedicating time to building Trip Ideas, which will give travellers a clearer idea of how much different trips across Africa cost. Travellers will be able to quickly and easily choose multiple lodges at their preferred budget level and auto-populate routes with lodges at each stage of their trip.
We’re also building new features which we hope will further improve the experience for our customers, such as Insider Tips, a selection of advice from our Africa travel experts on where to stay and why.
Whilst continuing to innovate, we’re also going to be continuing to run weekly feedback sessions with our customers to hear how we can improve. These have proven invaluable in helping us build the best product for our guests and make travel to Africa easier. If you’ve got 30-45 minutes, spare we’d love to hear your ideas! Book a feedback session here.
2. Increase revenue
Building on what has been a fantastic last quarter with bookings, we’re looking to further grow our customer base.
Over the next three months, we are going to focus on ramping up Adwords with brand-spanking new landing pages which we hope will further improve our ROI.
We’re also going to be launching a new and improved version of the The Wizard to make it easier for people to find their dream trip in Africa and increase conversion.
Another focus for the next quarter is exploring partnerships with companies that fit our brand, allowing us to plug in to their customer base and help them easily plan safaris across Africa.
3. Close our next round of fundraising
In order to reach our next big milestones sooner, we’re in the process of raising our next round of fundraising. If you’re excited about our mission and keen to jump on board then please get in touch and we’ll send you our investor presentation. We’d love to hear from you.
And that’s just the start…
This is just a high-level overview of what we’ve got in store for the coming months at Timbuktu HQ. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or would like to hear more!
