Recall your last vacation. What’s one thing that you wanted to take with you as a memory but had no place to buy it? Locally produced organic cosmetics, or a bottle of liquor with a hundred-year-old history? Here comes your chance.
Austrian brothers Matthias and Florian Handschuh have come up with 2wunder, a startup aiming to expand the value chain of hotels by integrating local adventures and products to their existing communication tools. The duo emerged as the winners of the Founders Battle – an academic challenge to start a company, initiated by Stefan Perkmann Berger from WhatAVenture, earlier this month.
“We joined the Founders Battle to increase the awareness of 2wunder and to get in touch with potential investors,” co-founder Florian Handschuh told inventures.eu. In addition, the two learned a lot about how to improve the presentation of their venture, he added.
As the first-place winner at the competition, the team took home a 25.000-euro cash prize, among other perks. So far, the founders have been bootstrapping, primarily thanks to the revenues from the two companies they founded during their studies – Panoramic Europe, an e-commerce venture, and Sugarparks, an online marketing agency for ski resorts and touristic boards.
As a result of their experience in e-commerce and marketing, they discovered the rising need of the hotel industry to monetise on hotel visitors in various ways and increase customer loyalty. With 2wunder, the duo have so far reached out to customers in Tyrol as well as in and around Munich. With their business model, the’re looking to earn a share on every sale made via the marketplace. Hotels will in turn also earn an affiliate share for every sale.
The brothers started working on their idea in November of last year, and launched the marketplace the following month. “We are currently developing an email marketing tool for hotels, which is already in the testing,” said Handschuh. “Within the next two weeks we will have a design rework on our website and then kick off customer acquisition.”
We’re looking forward to hearing more from the team!
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