In this trailer for The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, host Jim James interviews Ross, a senior executive at Wego, to unpack how the Singapore‑based travel metasearch grew into a billion‑dollar business. Ross first explains Wego’s core product – a consumer‑facing metasearch that aggregates flight and hotel prices from airlines, hotels, and online travel agencies, letting users verify they have shopped the market exhaustively. He then describes the classic cold‑start, two‑sided marketplace challenge and how Wego overcame it by white‑labeling its platform on high‑traffic portals such as Yahoo and MSN, creating an initial flywheel of merchant and consumer traffic. The conversation shifts to brand building: Wego split its marketing spend roughly 50/50 between performance (SEO, paid search, display, PR, content, influencer) and brand (TV advertising measured with split‑testing, partnerships that preload the app onto smartphones from Xiaomi, Samsung, Huawei). Ross emphasizes a long‑term, scientific approach to brand spend. Finally, he warns that AI will reshape the travel industry and all white‑collar work, urging early adoption. The trailer ends with a call‑to‑action to watch the full 20‑minute episode.
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Ross, fantastic to be here with you here in Singapore, the amazing WEGO offices. So for those people that don't understand what a metasearch engine is, Ross, give us a quick guide of what it is. What does the company do? What do people get by working with WEGO?
Yeah, so we're a sort of, you know, B2C online travel company, metasearch side of the business. So people come to us and they are comparing, they're shopping the market for flights and for hotels. We show 'em the price if they book direct with airlines and hotels. We also show 'em all the different online travel agency prices. And if they come to Wego, you know, they know they've exhaustively shopped all the— shopped the 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 have you built 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 2-sided marketplace. On one side, you've got consumers looking to buy travel.
Yeah.
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, you know, 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, you know, once you get over that of 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, just sort of performance driven. As we got bigger, we were, you know, we spent a lot of time actually building the brand and it's 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, you know, 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 yeah, we work— How does that work? Xiaomi and Samsung and Huawei. So we find ways to preload our app onto their phones so that when you buy your shiny new phone and you first boot it up, you know, we're already there. And, you know, I think what's happening with AI now is going to be as big, if not bigger. So if you are not already paying attention, I highly recommend you do. It's literally gonna, you know, reshape every industry. It's going to impacts an overwhelming majority of, you know, 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, you know, the way individuals work. So yeah, lots of different ways to, you know, dig in and figure out what's going on. But if you're not already paying attention, Now is the time to do so.
Now, this is just a trailer for a full 20-minute show. The show will be dropping into your feed in the next day or so, so do look out for it and do enjoy it, share it, and review it. Thanks for listening to this trailer of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur.
