Discover Wego's billion-dollar success story in the competitive travel search space.

Ross, fantastic to be here with you here in Singapore, the amazing wego offices. So for those who don't understand what a meta search engine is, Ross, give us a quick guide what it is. What does the company do? What do people get by working with Wego?

Yes. So we're a sort of B2C online travel company, Metasearch side of the business. So people come to us and they are comparing the shopping on market for flights and for hotels. We show them the price if they book direct with airlines and hotels. We also show them all the different online travel agency prices and if they come to wego, you know, they know they've exhaustively shopped, all shopped to market.

You know, with the unnoticed entrepreneur show. Love to just find out about how you've got wego noticed as a brand because obviously you've got the technology dimension, you've got a lot of different aspects of this business. But I'd love to focus on, you know, how do you build the brand? How have you got people?

Yeah, so back when we first started, we had a classic cold start marketplace problem. Right. So at its heart, MetaSearch is a two sided marketplace. On one side you've got consumers looking to buy travel or search for travel and on the other side you've got merchants looking to sell travel. And in the absence of a large number of consumers, the merchants aren't interested in working with you. Right. Because there's a cost to engaging and signing up and connecting. And we kind of got around that problem by white labeling our platform with Yahoo with MSN and a whole bunch of other big sort of horizontal portals that were significant drivers of traffic at the time. And once you get over that sort chicken and egg problem, it becomes a bit of a flywheel. We think of ourselves as a primarily technology company that just happens to be operating in the travel industry. And as such we spent a lot of time using all the standard sort of digital marketing channels. So you know, we did a lot of organic search optimization, we did a lot of paid search, we did a lot of display marketing across all the different publishers. Do a lot of pr, do a lot of content marketing, a lot of influencer marketing. And the marketing mix has evolved. Originally it was like pure digital and a lot of it, you know, sort of performance driven. As we got bigger, we were, you know, we spent a lot of time actually building the brand and just different to a lot of online travel companies. But yeah, we sort of were thinking longer term. So if you look at where we spend our money, it's Roughly half on brand, half on sort of performance or tactical stuff. And on the brand side of the ledger, you know, we do tv, good old fashioned tv. We try and do it in a sort of fairly scientific, measured, you know, we sort of measure the direct response, we measure the uplift, we try and do split testing wherever we can, but we do, yeah, we find that works. We have a lot of marketing partners, we've got some good partnerships with some of the people who make mobile phones. So, you know, we work. How does that work? Xiaomi and Samsung and Huawei. So we find ways to preload our app onto their phone so that when you buy your shiny new phone and you first boot it up, you know we're already there. And yeah, I think what's happening with AI now is going to be as big, if not bigger. So if you're not already paying attention, I highly recommend you do. It's literally going to reshape every industry. It's going to impact an overwhelming majority of white collar workers and you want to be early, you really don't want to be late. And you know it's going to change companies, but it's also going to change the way individuals work. So, yeah, lots of different ways to dig in and figure out what's going on. But if you're not already paying attention, know now is the time to do so.

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