This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Friends, community, listeners, welcome to another episode of Side Hustle School. My name's Chris Guillebeau, your host. Today is our weekly segment known as Throwback Thursday. We also call it Where Are They Now? Because in this segment, we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them.
Now, last week we heard from the founder of Styles for Kids, a Chicago organization that helps parents and kids with hair care. Today in our latest feature, we're gonna hear from David Bale, an American living in Belgium. He's the founder of Go Last Minute, which was originally a travel booking portal, and it still is, but it now also offers a whitelist option for licensing. So he's been focusing a bit more on that. We last heard about Dave more than 1,000 days ago.
So what's happened since? Let's hear directly from him, including a bit about that licensing, including how the company did during COVID-19, and a few other updates. I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap-up. [Music]
So I'm Dave Bale. I was featured on episode 1091 at Side Hustle School, and my side hustle is golastminute.com.
Go Last Minute helps people find great deals on flights, hotels, and car rentals. It's a site that I started in 2006, and it was nights and weekends, and basically bare money for a few years. At the time, I was working as a product manager at a company called Real Networks. And basically I just set up the site and came and expedited affiliate and started playing around with the technology. So that was really great to keep my tech skills sharp and get into coding again.
I didn't really have a chance to do that in my job. And then in about 2009, I decided to change the model of it to make it a daily deals travel website, going after kind of like what Brubon was doing at the time. Everybody was signing up for daily deal email alerts. And so that was a great way to get a lot of email subscribers quickly. And I basically hired a team to publish daily travel deals and put them in an email format.
And so the site grew really quickly. Within a couple of years, we were at a million email subscribers, and now we're at over 6 million subscribers, email subscribers that have signed up as we started. So my main hustle continues to be golastminute.com. That's basically my day doc is just working on that, bringing on new advertisers and new clients. And then also working with existing advertisers to make sure they're getting benefits out of their campaigns.
It's an ad funded website. So while users go and they make travel searches for flights and hotels and car rentals, on the other side, of course, there's advertisers who like to reach those users. And that's really our primary revenue model. That's how we make money. So it's sort of a constant feeding to make sure that users are happy with the user experience.
And also the advertisers are happy with the traffic that we send them. So obviously the pandemic, COVID-19 pandemic, really awful, it's affected a lot of people in terms of their health. Many people passed away. In my life, a good friend of mine passed away, which was terrible. And so the world has changed.
And at that time, we saw 90% of our revenue on Go Last Minute drop from one week to the next in March, 2020, but we survived. And thankfully I had been working really hard to automate a lot of the Go Last Minute with my team here. So we didn't have a huge staff at that time. And so we were able to get through the pandemic without laying off anymore. So that was a win.
We were able to kind of put our heads down and build out a new product called TravelSci.io, which is a SaaS product, which is a white label travel affiliate website based on the same technology as golastminute.com. And the idea is that with TravelSci.io, an entrepreneur could start their own travel business using our platform. I would say just don't give up. Keep experimenting with new things. Keep learning, stay curious.
Make sure you measure your results when you test things so you know what's working, what isn't. It's really important to track your results that you can evaluate, whether those changes you made are actually working. [Music]
Awesome, thanks so much, Dave. Really appreciate those updates. So glad you guys were able to make it through the pandemic, especially a travel business, no less experiencing 90% drop in revenue.
But as you heard listeners, he's still going strong, working on that whitelist TravelSci option, which is pretty cool. Check it out at travelsite.io. If you've ever wanted to have a TravelSci of your own where you get paid when people make bookings, that's exactly the kind of business that is. Basically, you pay a monthly fee and that gives you access to all this content. And then your main job is to drive traffic to the website.
So that was travelsite.io. And of course, the main website, golastminute.com. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than a thousand stories. If you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, love to hear that as well. sidehustleschool.com/questions.
In today's notes, including links to everything mentioned, sidehustleschool.com/20282028. Thanks for listening today. I hope you'll tune in again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
