106 Elude: Building a New Search Engine and Brand for Global Travel | Alex Simon, Co-Founder & CEO

“It's not who you know, it's who knows you.” – Alex Simon

Alex Simon is the co-founder and CEO of Elude, which is focused on helping people find and book incredible travel experiences. It's the only place where you can simply input your max budget, your local airport, and how many days you'd like to be gone to find incredible destinations around the world that fit those parameters. So you can ask the question, where can I go next week for a thousand dollars?

This episode is a fascinating, deep dive into the world of travel, from the unique barriers to building an airline and hotel booking business—which include a surprising amount of regulation—to an overview of the major players in the travel space and a look at what it's like to build a cutting edge company in a very old industry.

In our conversation, we go deep on why travel is considered a startup graveyard and how Elude overcame all of those obstacles to build a big and completely new company in the industry. We cover how they brought deep experience building Google Search to build their own unique search experience for travel. We talk through all of the regulations in the travel industry, why they exist, and how they impact travel companies. We discuss why Elude wanted to become a merchant of record, owning the customer and transaction from end to end, rather than follow the typical playbook of simply building a search UI and then using affiliate links to airline and hotel websites. Finally, we discuss all of the lessons that Alex and his team have learned building Elude over the last few years, and reaching more than 500,000 searches to date.

Show notes with links, quotes, and a transcript of the episode:

Topics discussed with Alex Simon:
This episode is our definitive guide to building a startup in the travel industry. In it we cover:
00:00:00 – The path from investment banking to entrepreneurship
00:03:20 – The Elude customer journey, from app download to travel time
00:11:55 – Building a travel search engine from the ground up
00:17:19 – Why the travel industry is a startup graveyard
00:23:16 – How travel regulations make it difficult to build and scale a business in the industry
00:30:27 – Why becoming a merchant of record was crucial to Elude’s success
00:33:04 – Building a brand with the help of Apple advisors
00:41:52 – The difficulties and rewards of entrepreneurship
00:47:40 – It’s not who you know; it’s who knows you

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