Maps Untold: In a foreign city, never again an overpriced beer

When asked why he did not continue with his master's degree after his bachelor's he remains silent for a moment. Just for a moment. In the end I am not someone for the college benches,' says Dennis van Ravenstein (26). 'I prefer to learn through practice and I found entrepreneurship just much more fun than studying... But I actually already knew that when I was fourteen and had a side job in a family friend's company.’

Too expensive beer

Entrepreneurship runs in Dennis' blood. The moment he closed his study books for good, he was already fully occupied with Maps Untold, a company in which he can express his passion for data science and technology. The idea for Maps Untold, as is the case for many enterprises, came from a practical problem. ‘My co-founder Gaby had gone to St. Petersburg,' Dennis explains. ‘One evening she thought she had ended up in a nice pub, but when she checked out she found that a beer cost 9 euros. Far too expensive for a poor student. Had she known beforehand, of course she would never have stayed in that pub.’ Gaby told the anecdote about the expensive beer to Dennis upon returning home. And then the penny dropped: How do you quickly and easily find the hotspots that suit you in an unfamiliar city? There had to be a modern solution to that.

Hotspots and must-sees

Gaby (Gomes Branco) and Dennis joined forces and developed a tool that gives users personalized information about the places to be, in the Netherlands but also in surrounding countries. Dennis: "You get suggestions based based on your personal preferences. Do you like Indian food, then the tool leads guides you to the best Indian restaurants in the foreign city where you are currently currently staying. Do you like going to certain museums, then the app suggests similar museums. Ditto for things to do and tourist must-sees. See Maps Untold as Tripadvisor, but not with random hotspots.  With Maps Untold, you find places that you are very likely to actually like. That is what the algorithm takes care of.’

Algorithm

The secret, of course, is under the hood. Gaby and Dennis have a database with hundreds of thousands of restaurants, hotels, museums and nightlife spots. But also with information about the atmosphere, what's on the menu and so on. They got that data from Google amongst other data sources. They  enriched their database by analyzing reviews. On the one hand the algorithm works like Spotify: if you like The Beatles, there is a good chance that you will also like The Rolling Stones. If you are a lover of modern art, you will get suggestions for museums with modern art in the foreign city you are in for the first time. Dennis: "But there is also a second model. If someone gives a 5-star rating on Google, the app looks to see which other 5-star rating this person has given. Does the behavior of this person resemble your behavior, then Maps Untold will recommend places that this person rated with five stars.’

Tinder didn't work

Development of the tool took a year or two. 'We tried things that turned out not to work well anyway,' Dennis explains. It turned out that swiping locations - like on Tinder - did not yield the desired result. You immediately get an impression when seeing the face of a man or woman,' Dennis laughs, ‘but if you don't know a restaurant, you can't determine from a photo and summary whether you will like it there.' The business model also had to evolve. 'We sold the tool to city marketers. We are now live on the websites of The Hague and Tilburg. Tourists can use the websites to get suggestions on fun places to go. Also, we sold the tool to hotels. Their customers can then use the tool as a service from the hotel. In the coming months we want to grow considerably in number of end users. But with the current business model, it is not growing fast enough. So we have shifted our focus and are now focusing entirely on the tourists themselves. We reach the tourists via channels like hotels, city marketeers and other tourist platforms. We offer our free service, white-labeled to their guests

Coach interviews

Gaby studies at the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (JADS) in Den Bosch, a collaboration of Tilburg University and Technical University of Eindhoven. From JADS, Gaby and Dennis are coached by an experienced startup entrepreneur. Every three weeks they sit around the table for three hours to talk about the company. 'That has already helped us a lot,' Dennis states. 'For example our idea was to lower the price of our tool. That way we thought we would be more attractive to partners like hotels and city marketers. But our coach had experience with that and advised us not to do that. He said, "Make the tool temporarily free, that will probably get you a lot more visitors." He convinced us that we had to change our original idea.’

Network

Does Dennis regret studying for four years? In that time, he could have been able to do business. "No, in fact, I see many advantages to studying, he replies. 'The most important thing is the network you gain as a student. And in Tilburg and Eindhoven, a lot is organized for entrepreneurial students. Gaby and I make a lot of use of that. For example, we are now participating in the “Demoday" of Tilburg University IQONIC, a series of workshops in which you learn how to make a pitch to potential investors. With the current proof-of-concept, we are fundraising to develop to tool to be more scalable and reach more tourists. We are now at a thousand end users per month but that should be ten times as many by the end of this summer. What we especially want to know is how our target group thinks, what their wishes and preferences are. That is not only a matter of market research, but also of a lot of talking to end users.’