Our first steps and fails
On August 25, 2017, we left Burger House with a full understanding of what exactly and how we will work. The plan was as simple as possible: create tours in Bishkek → sell them to hotels.
Yes, the initial Show Me [Bishkek] model was 99% offline. All that was required of us was to develop interesting excursions around our hometown, train a team of guides and then convince local hotel staff to sell our services to their guests, of course, for a fee. We didn’t see any competitors among existing companies, because every business related to tourism here was focused on organizing multi-day tours, and kept a couple of excursions in Bishkek exclusively “just because they had too”. Nobody took the city on account, and we decided to do it.
The first thing I had to do was to make a list of all kinds of activities that we could sell to our customers. Typically, travel agencies offered guests 3 options for one-day tours. I have developed a list of 20.
The second step was to work on the routes in Bishkek. I made the initial draft in about 15 minutes, sitting in the kitchen. There were no super-complex processes — I just took a free city map issued by one of the local travel agencies and drew option A and option B on it.
The third step — damn difficult — was preparing a script for the tour. The script had to describe everything — sightseeings, transitions between them, guide behavior, possible deviations from the route… I worked on it for about a month. I was lucky — there were no templates, we did everything from scratch and could not limit ourselves to the framework “as it should be done, and how not”. As a result, the script turned out to be quite subjective — I included everything I liked myself and deleted everything I didn’t really like.
The truth about city tours — most clients walking along the streets with a guide do not remember specific dates and difficult-to-pronounce names and surnames. Looking at the beautiful building, they do not care who built it. They are interested in visuals and stories if these stories are worthwhile.
By the end of September 2017, everything was ready for us to recruit a team of guides and begin their training. Everything except the budget. I had to take a chance — I placed an advertisement on finding employees for the position of guide-guide without a salary. To my surprise, I got feedback very quickly. We recruited only young girls — cool, bright, smiling and with excellent knowledge of English.
Not too “adult” — because the guide should not look like a school history teacher. Not very “ordinary” — because there is nothing worse than an unemotional guide with an apathetic expression.
We recruited a team of four. At the interview, I talked about our new project, about great prospects and that we don’t have a budget for salaries, but when we “blow up”, the guides will receive 1500–2500 som for each tour. Given that a salary of 15,000 som per month in Bishkek is considered pretty decent, the conditions for our guides seemed very good. What is important — I myself sincerely believed in it. And we started training.
The next month, we actively worked in my living room, the walls of which were hung with stickers with the names of attractions from our excursions. We rehearsed storytelling in Russian and English, at the same time developed advertising booklets and a simple one-page website. It was a real move — we bought tea in batches, from morning to evening, told each other stories about the city, discussed design options for booklets and prepared for a big start. At the end of October 2017, the team was fully prepared.
A few days before the end of the month, I received our advertising booklets from the printing house. I brought them home, sorted them in packs and the next morning brought them to hotels, guest houses, and hostels in Bishkek. It took me a whole day to distribute thousands of booklets and talk with many receptionists and administrators. By late evening, the issue with the hotels was resolved, and the only thing we could do at that moment was to wait. Everyone was full of energy, everyone was eager to work, but…
The phone was silent. In the first week, we didn’t receive a single call or a single message. The same for the second week. Waiting was a hella difficult. Then there were rare applications and refusals on them, so about a week passed before the first conversion. In total, two months from the start of sales, we received only seven orders. Seven orders for four guides. It was a failure.
The team could not stand it. Aigul left first. Then Veta. Aigerim left a little later, by family reasons, but anyway. It was clear that we were doing something wrong, but nobody knew how to do it right. We entered 2018 with full awareness of the fucking reality — the current model doesn’t work, and our only guide can leave at any moment. Optimism waned, despondency grew. I made several more attempts to an offline promotion, but they didn’t work. Oleg insisted that we need to go online. I didn’t know anything about digital marketing, but we had nothing to lose. I agreed.
