Unvalidated Learnings

4 Reasons Why We Are Investing In Capitaine Train (Again)

For those of you who don’t speak French, the tweet above reads something like: “Ok, I believe @capitainetrain has got THE BEST F**** USER EXPERIENCE IN THE WORLD (such a kick-ass customer support)”. 

While no doubt on the extreme in its expression of enthusiasm, a quick peek at Capitaine Train’s Twitter feed shows that this declaration of love is by no mean unique, and echoes a feeling shared by many users of the service. Here is a pretty good rule of thumb: as a company, if you can get your users to swear in capital letters how much they love you on Twitter, you’re probably onto something, and you’re likely to have hit a raw nerve. 

In Capitaine Train’s case, the raw nerve looks a lot like this:

Yes, train ticket distribution in continental Europe is still owned by the national incumbent train companies, with the level of user experience and customer support typical of such organisations. Their customers are frustrated, and wherever there is customer frustration, there is a business opportunity, which Capitaine Train set to exploit in 2009, 2 weeks after the French competition council stated that the SNCF had to open up its inventory to 3rd parties, in order to comply with European regulations.  

Of course, the reality of the European railway market’s liberalisation turned out to be less rosy than its promises and when I first talked to Jean-Daniel, Martin and Valentin in December 2011 they had been battling with the SNCF for almost 2 years to get access to usable data, and were still limited to closed beta, and were crippled by such expensive fees that they were losing money on every ticket sold, and were set to do so unless they sold over €100m of tickets a year. Not a small order for any bootstrapped startup.

In spite of these difficulties, we decided to back them with €500k of seed capital last year, and to keep supporting them today with a €1.1m contribution to their Series A. Here are the four main reasons why:

1. A team on a mission

These guys never had it easy. This is to be expected when you set to attack one of the most powerful monopoly left in France, the SNCF. It took them many months to get access to all the data they needed, and many more to make sense of it and present it in a usable format. The reward for their hard work? A negative contribution margin on every ticket sold… 

But it didn’t put them off and they kept ploughing on, constantly trying to negotiate better deals and find alternative providers to limit their reliance on one supplier. They could have failed many times over but they’ve made it this far and when you spend time with them, you realise how much this journey has toughened them up. Today, they’re not simply aiming at building a good business and make money, they are on a mission. A mission to make European train travellers’ lives better. And they have a very clear vision of how to achieve it.

2. Two obsessions: product + customer support

Building a great train ticketing engine is not as easy as it sounds: it needs to be fast, to offer an exhaustive combination of itineraries with the cheapest prices, support a variety of loyalty cards, and make payments easy and secure. It is both a complex engineering and design problem. Which they are solving by combining the most powerful itinerary engine in Europe (so powerful that it now offers cheaper prices than Voyages SNCF on more than 10% of all journeys, as explained here) with the most simple (some would say minimalistic) User Interface. You can watch Jean-Daniel speak about their UX here (you know a UX designer is French when he uses “boulangerie” as his case study for great customer experience…).

No advertising, no car rental, no hotels, no flights, no unnecessary option. The result: 50 seconds to book a ticket vs. 3+ minutes on Voyages SNCF. And potentially cheaper too.

And while many highly technical teams make the mistake to think their job is done once the customer has transacted and is off their website, the Capitaine Train team has always understood that even the best products require top-notch customer support by real humans. They recently wrote a long blog about their vision for customer support: https://blog.capitainetrain.com/1923-lobsession-du-service-client, and if you check their twitter feed, you will find them replying to customer tweets on Sundays at 10.30pm. Their goal is clear: eliciting #WOW moments from their customers.

3. Insane customer loyalty

The Capitaine Train equation can be summarised as follows: Existing Customer Frustration + Great Product + WOW Customer Support = Outstanding Customer Loyalty. Indeed 70% of the customers who bought a ticket in April 2011 bought one last month. That kind of retention is, by any standard, exceptional. Simply put, once you go Capitaine Train, you don’t come back. And, more often than not, you tell all your friends about it. Which is how they’ve reached €10m of annual run rate without any marketing.

4. Very very mass market

Of course, all this wouldn’t be as exciting if Capitaine Train were disrupting the reclining bicycle market. But rail transportation is a truly mass market, with about 8 billion passengers in Europe every year (10x more than air travel). Voyages SNCF is the largest travel ecommerce website in France with 11 million monthly uniques and €3.6bn in annual turnover. With 75% of all French Internet users visiting it at least once a year, it is probably the most mainstream one too. 

And Capitaine Train is not limiting itself to France either: it has already integrated with Deutsche Bahn, Thalys and Eurostar and there are more integrations to come in many more European countries. Once again, their goal is simple: become the #1 destination for booking train tickets anywhere in Europe.

Conclusion

Working with them hasn’t always been easy. The flip side of having such a strong mission/vision is that there is no room for compromises. They are religious on many topics: they develop everything in-house, using only open-source technology, won’t do any aggressive marketing or develop any “viral” feature that’s not core to the booking experience, will not allow any ad on their platform, and refuse to ship a product until it is absolutely pixel-perfect. Their product and service will succeed or fail on its merits only.

More critically, they are still a far cry from having won their most difficult battle: the fight against the inertia monster. Indeed, they are still being used by only a small group of super early adopters, as most customers are not even aware that an alternative to Voyages SNCF exists (and even less aware that they would actually be better off using it). Moving the cursor from a pure tech and product focused startup to a marketing-driven company is their biggest challenge yet. 

But these guys are survivors, and as such, will always be able to evolve and thrive. And this is why we are so excited and feeling so lucky to be part of it.

The team celebrating their Travel d’Or in their shiny new office rue Ambroise Thomas (click on it for the animation!)

“Reinventing The Calendar”. Or Why Ideas Are Not Unique, Execution Is

“Right now, 100 people are already working on your idea.” 

This is the story I will tell every entrepreneur who doesn’t want to give me details about her idea, or asks me to sign an NDA before she will even give me her name: 

9 months ago, I took part in my first Startup Weekend in London (you can read about it here: Startup Weekend London: “It’s the team, stupid”). I pitched a very simple idea, which actually took the form of a question: “If we were inventing the calendar today, what would it look like?”.

I didn’t have the answer but it sounded pretty safe to bet that it wouldn’t look like the terrible, grid-based, paper-inspired apps featuring on the home screen of every single smartphone around the world. Look at your calendar app. Then look at Path. Then look at your calendar app again. And now you know that something needs to happen. That something is going to happen. 

This is the presentation we gave:

Indeed, at that very moment, two teams (that I know of today) were starting to work on the exact same problem - Cue in San Francisco and Sunrise in NYC - and have now released the first version of their apps. Which no doubt will become really amazing after a few iterations. Proving once again that no idea, especially one as simple, obvious and universal as this one, is unique, and that only its execution can be. 

This may be stressful for entrepreneurs but it’s a blessing for consumers: it means that, at any given time, tens of teams around the globe are working on solving your most pressing needs (assuming they are big and universal enough. But if people are building purpose-built rings for thumb wrestling competitions, they will build everything). 

Ça ressemble à quoi un ascenseur social?

Certaines rencontres en disent plus long sur notre société que n’importe quel rapport ou discours politique. 

C’est le cas de ma rencontre avec Paul, un garçon de 22 ans avec qui j’ai petit-dejeuné ce matin. 

Le fils du forgeron

Originaire d’une famille modeste, père forgeron et mère au foyer, il ne brille pas par ses résultats scolaires. Un bac (moyen) en poche, il décide de suivre des études de “Media Management”, un cursus généraliste censé lui apprendre des notions de gestion et des connaissances sur l’industrie des médias. Se rendant vite compte que ce qu’on lui enseigne ne sera jamais de la moindre utilité à quelque employeur que ce soit, il ne termine pas sa première année, et se retrouve, comme tant de gens de notre génération, sans emploi, sans expérience professionnelle, et sans diplôme sérieux.

Et pourtant, ce matin, trois ans après l’arrêt de ses études, ce n’est pas dans la file d’attente du Job Center que j’ai rencontré Paul, mais bien à la table d’un des cafés branchés de Shoreditch. Et s’il m’a demandé de petit déjeuner avec lui, ce n’est pas pour que je l’aide à trouver un boulot, mais pour que je lui donne mon avis sur lequel refuser.

En effet, Paul hésite aujourd’hui entre 5 startups établies qui lui offrent des salaires supérieurs à £40k par an, ainsi que de généreuses stock-options, représentant potentiellement plusieurs centaines de milliers de £ (voire de millions, s’il a la chance et le flair de rejoindre le prochain Facebook). Mais l’argent ne faisant pas tout, il veut trouver le meilleur environnement de travail et un produit qui le passionne vraiment. Car il a le luxe inouï de pouvoir choisir.

Chômage? Quel chômage?

Quel est donc le secret de Paul? De quel pouvoir magique est-il le détenteur pour ensorceler tant de potentiels employeurs? La réponse tient en un mot, qui n’a rien d’ésotérique: Paul est front-end développer. Il maitrise plusieurs langages web essentiels: HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery. Comment les a-t-il appris? Ses parents lui ont-ils payé des écoles spécialisées hors de prix? Non. Il est tombé dedans à 16 ans, en essayant de customiser son profile MySpace pour impressionner les filles. Et il a tout appris par lui-même, en faisant, et en utilisant les milliers de ressources gratuites disponibles sur Internet.

Le secteur dans lequel je travaille, les startups Internet, ne connait pas le chômage: il connait la pénurie de talents. Si Paul a cinq offres d’emploi c’est que nos startups n’arrivent pas à trouver suffisamment de gens motivés qui possèdent ses compétences. Et si, dans le même temps, des millions de gens ne trouvent pas de boulot, ce n’est pas simplement qu’il n’y en a pas assez pour eux, mais aussi qu’ils n’ont pas les compétences dont les entreprises ont besoin. C’est une évidence, mais on la mentionne rarement. Les boites avec lesquelles je bosse se foutent pas mal que leurs employés aient Bac+10 ou, comme Paul, Bac+0. Elles veulent juste qu’ils soient capables de faire ce qu’elles leur demandent. De créer une sublime Web application par exemple. 

L’ascenseur social est en panne…: J’ai pris mon clavier!

C’est en cela que le mythe des études secondaires et du diplôme est fondamentalement pervers. Faire croire à des millions de jeunes qu’il leur suffit d’additionner le plus grand nombre de chiffres derrière leur bac pour avoir le boulot de leur rêve est au mieux inconscient, au pire criminel. Dans la vraie vie, celle des entreprises privées qui paient des impôts et doivent être profitables pour exister, on ne recrute pas des années d’études, on recrute des compétences. 

Et c’est grâce à cela que des gens comme Paul, qui n’ont pas fait d’études, qui n’ont pas de capital de départ - ni culturel, ni social, ni financier - peuvent trouver le boulot de leurs rêves. Un boulot qu’ils aiment et qui les rémunère suffisamment pour vivre bien, voire même pour les mettre à l’abri du besoin pour le restant de leurs jours. Il n’a eu besoin ni de pistons, ni de contrats aidés. Il s’est fait tout seul, dans sa chambre, grâce à son travail et son intelligence. Et grâce à Internet. 

Car Internet est le grand égalisateur. Tout le monde est égal derrière son ordinateur. Tout le monde a accès aux mêmes ressources et aux mêmes outils. Il n’y a ni âge, ni genre, ni race, ni religion, ni classe. Les matheux peuvent coder, les artistes peuvent designer, les littéraires peuvent écrire. Et les pauvres peuvent devenir riches. Par leur travail et leur intelligence. 

Ça ressemble à ça un ascenseur social.

The case for forgetting your way to the office (and taking long breaks)

Since I joined Index three years ago, I’ve been getting to work by bike pretty much every single day. That’s how I realised it actually wasn’t raining that much in London. Or maybe I just stopped caring about it.

If you asked me what the best part about riding a bike to work is, I wouldn’t say the fresh air, the exercise, or the freedom, I would actually tell you it’s the predictability. The entire London transportation system may drown under a tsunami, I would still arrive at the office between 15 and 20 minutes after I left home. 

The price to pay for this predictability is that I gave up any creativity. After two weeks of trial and error, I had identified (what I thought was) the optimal route and stuck to it for the next three years. 600 rides or so following exactly the same streets, the same right and left turns, uphill, downhill, in the same order.

But although I thought it was optimal, I still didn’t find that journey perfect. Three blocks after my flat, there would be a dangerous junction, in a small, quiet, hidden street, where large trucks park on both sides, hence obstructing any visibility. Every day for three years I would moan and curse, and threaten to write a letter to my local MP, convinced I would one day get hit at that very location.

It lasted until Wednesday, last week, when, completely inadvertently, I took a right turn one street before the junction, which led me straight past the trucks and safely onto the next leg of my journey. I didn’t do it because I wanted to solve that particular junction problem, but simply because I had been away from London for over a month, and had forgotten about the “optimal” route. 

This may be a trivial example but it shows what those long breaks are amazing for: they break the routine and allow you to see and do things differently, in your work, but also in your life in general. I wish Index would let me have more of them!