CodeBase - Playbooks for Building Startups: Disruption Case Study - Shona Marsh

I'm Shona I'm the head of education programs at code base and my background is in travel and tourism and working at tourist boards and and then moving into

a travel based uh startup and then I've worked in a scale-up a unicorn um in the travel industry um and following that I I worked as sort of a coach Mentor tutor and advisor in

early stage um Tech businesses and University entrepreneurship programs and so the detail of sort of how I actually got into the startup part of that and is that I started my career in visitor

centers and Market marketing and brand development in tourist boards and I had a personal interest in accessibility so enabling people with disabilities and

other types of accessibility issues and to access tourism and Leisure and I started working with two people in one of my jobs contractors and to help promote the area for people with

disabilities and also to connect the dots and do a bit of um sort of on-the-ground product development work on x tourism and opportunities and and after I sort of finished that role

and one of the founders had just finished his MBA I decided to go freelance and I kept connecting with them over my time sort of like working in the tourist

boards and had started helping connect them into other tourism regions um in England to develop their accessibility work so I sort of still kept this connection with them I really loved what they were doing and was really

interested by it and it was a real personal interest and after shrin had finished his MBA he had received a grant from the Oxford Saeed foundation and to

test an idea in the accessible tourism and Leisure space and he'd sent me sort of like a oh amazing you're going freelance you've got some time what do you think about this proposal that I've

put together to win this grant and I sent him back two pages of thoughts on what I thought about what his thoughts had been um and sort of where the industry was at

that time and what the trends were in terms of tech and adoption and he just said cool uh we need someone to do those things we like your ideas do you want to make that happen

um and I guess the rest is history it um it sort of tied into the time that I was looking for something new um anyway and so I joined them on like a

part-time um contract basis so two Founders and me and one of the founders taught themselves to code the other had experience and expertise in marketing and comms and shrin built the MVP and

then I worked on everything else so Supply sales Business Development a bit of product management customers and managing our finances uh recruiting new

team members sorting out processes writing blog posts and anything that came with building that business from there on and I was involved with

um uh we raised Angel investment so we raised about 300 000 pounds to grow the product and the team after we tested that early stage um product that we'd built with the Grant and and then when we were going on

to raise our series a round of funding which is normally what you would sort of call that a big tranche that you would take in after you've done all of that um early stage development and testing in Market with your minimal viable

product which is your MVP and we actually had an acquisition offer at that point rather than an investment offer and we decided to pursue that instead so at the end of 2017 we sold

that business to Airbnb and Incorporated our product into into theirs so we tagged ourselves as the Airbnb for people with disabilities the business was called a comable and sort of able

accommodation and and uh we integrated that into Airbnb who now have an accessibility product within their main service so as someone with a disability you can use Airbnb in the same way that

an able-bodied person might be able to and have access to high quality Supply to um filtering the meets your requirements and to verified um information and for things that meet

your needs So a family friend um had a disability and affected her Mobility but she was also a massive adrenaline junkie and I was involved in booking a lot of trips and going on

those trips with her and so we took her skiing and we took her zip lining cycling like off-roading like anything she wanted to do I would find a way to

make it happen so in my personal life I was involved in tourism and Leisure like in the disability space quite a lot but then I realized like I do this for a job and I'm not bringing

that into my like work life so like I'm encouraging people to book tourism-based activities or explore areas but I haven't got anything around this piece that I'm having problems with

outside of work and I'm not enabling anyone else to be able to do that in the in the destinations that I'm working in so those were the New Forest National Park and Winchester City uh the region of

Poole and like the south of England in general and and so it was like a fortuitous I'd done and then I started pitching for work in that place and and securing

funding to manage project projects in my area that were to do with accessible tourism and then it sort of like all came together like a personal interest in making this happen and then a professional opportunity to actually

disrupt this sector and make a difference so where the accessible tourism Market was at the time um and still is to to a long extent which is really frustrating and is that

on say you go to booking.com you would look for um hotels in Paris on these specific dates and they need parking if you're a

disabled traveler or person with a disability traveling you may also um need to ensure that you have a roll-in shower like a flush level

bathroom where you can walk uh not walk into the shower there's no step no threshold and most websites including booking.com at the moment have wheelchair accessible as a tick box

there's absolutely nothing that defines what wheelchair accessible means it's um and everyone with a disability who's a wheelchair user has a different need you may be a power wheelchair user who's

fully independent you can transfer and you can maybe have some level of mobility and can walk a few steps or up a step you may be a power wheelchair user who requires 24-hour tearing

assistance to use the bathroom to feed yourself and to do all these other activities and the requirements of those wheelchair users are really different and nobody was catering for this Market

in a self-serve way you could ring a travel agent and pay them loads of money to find you all of these things or you were having to ring up the hotel and find out exactly which room has the facilities I need does it have a grab

bar by the toilet is the door wide enough to fit my wheelchair through um is there a hearing Loop because I have hearing impairment and I need to be able to hear the smoke alarm or see have a

visual um smoke alarm in my room and all these things that people with access needs and really need to be able to experience travel and Leisure in the same way that an able-bodied person does

and the disability Market is absolutely massive and the stats are that like 20 to 30 percent of someone has either a registered disability now and or even

higher percentage of us will in the future due to an aging population who have mobility issues or even if you think about the fact that you might have children in a push chair so steps again

are really challenging and so what we devised at accommable was a list of criteria that we from customer research we've believed people were needing to

search for to be able to book accommodation without the massive barriers that were there already and and they needed to know that that information had been verified so every

tick box we had 27 filters by the time we sold and and that was where we capped it for that that point every filter had to have verified photos that that feature existed in your

property and and we got to the point where we were doing things like video tours so people could see the flow through the building and so that yes there might not be a step to the front door but there might be a step into the bedroom or there might be a step into

the bathroom or down um and so it was doing all of these things to ensure that people with disabilities had the same access to tourism offerings that an able-bodied

person did and had as few barriers as possible to booking and and that adds enormous value to the business in terms of being able to access that market and and it's also just the right thing to do

and so I guess that's the story as to how like the detail of um of my experience led to the startup the

startup was called a comable and we tagged ourselves as Airbnb for people with disabilities and so a comma well being able accommodation I think as a merger but I was never involved in any

of The Branding and and marketing so don't blame me for that for the tongue twister on that one and yeah so that's how we got there what I think is really exciting about startups is that you can create

something completely new you can change the way that you or like the entire population um or completely different um like entire groups of people do

things and experience things you can really add value to an industry so if you've come from a specific industry or you've got personal interest like you can make a huge difference in that

industry and for example like taking a combo as an example the fact that we did that and we sold that business to Airbnb and integrated that business model into Airbnb and gave importance to

accessibility means that other players in the industry also now have to do the same to be seem to be like keeping up um or to be seen or to do the right

thing to to be a part of that that industry and so it's really cool to be able to sort of like solve a problem and scratch that itch and see something something that really challenged you

previously you can create the solution for and I think the other thing for me that was really exciting is that I was quite young

um or I feel relatively young and when I joined that business I was 24 when I started working in a startup and I learned so much in such a short space of

time that otherwise you wouldn't really get the opportunity for like you're exposed to so many parts of building a business and to so many people um in the industry working with people

at really senior levels to gen to sort of sign Partnerships and in integrate different um Technologies into your business and all these other things and you learn

more than you could ever sort of pay for by being a part of that you learn so much on the job and and I think that's been invaluable like doing vat returns

and managing our balance sheet um through to like creating contracts for new employees and signing partnership deals managing sales processes and

setting up stalls at Global um like conferences like all these things I I wouldn't have been able to do in a bigger or more established business