How we re-built our startup by staying true to its core values
This is how at BidAway we worked through a complete company overhaul while retaining our core values and ideals.
Throughout my career, I have worked all over Europe as consultant at the WTO (World Trade Organization) and as corporate financial manager leading teams and working on large projects before managing a holiday resort. Currently, as CEO at BidAway, I am in charge of product development and general management (legal, external relations, business development). While in this position, it happened to me a thing rarely seen in tech today: a company overhaul driven not by technological needs but by the evolution and expansion of our core values.
A few years ago, BidAway was supposed to be an online platform in which luxury hotels could put up their extra rooms for auction, thus letting the clients set the price for them. In our vision, that was a way to give everyone the chance of accessing exclusive (and usually very expensive) holidays.
Working and thinking on this brought us to the next logical step, that became the stepping stone for our radical rebranding: to offer unique experiences to everyone; if before we were making luxury travel more accessible notwithstanding of the clients’ economic conditions, now we are offering amazingly exclusive experiences available to everyone, through sweepstakes or auctions.
Plus, we added a new layer: of the amount collected by every campaign we retain only 20% while the rest is donated to a charity to help them in their social goals.
Switching from tourism to celebrity experiences has been an enormous change, affecting everything from the way that we work to our brand identity. This is not unheard of in the startup world where everything is constantly evolving, but I’m proud that we did that by building on our very same principles.
In the current version of BidAway we work on three fronts:
1) on the one hand, we encourage people to fulfill their dreams by showing them that meeting their idols, even if it seems impossible, really is not as difficult as they would think, and now, thanks to our innovative platform, everyone is just one step away to achieving it;
2) on the other hand, we also want to reveal the human side of the celebrities, offering them a real channel through which they can get closer to their fans, showing who they really are and what they care about;
3) furthermore, the most important part of this win-win project is that there’s also a third winner, because the money collected from the campaigns goes to NGOs and Charities supported by the celebrities themselves.
All in all, we’ve created a chain reaction based in two steps: first, the celebrities run campaigns for good causes, and thanks to their fans’ engagement, they are able to raise funds to support several charitable organizations; then, the charities carry different kinds of humanitarian work which have a positive impact in society.
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