It’s what every founder hopes for. Create a product you’re excited about, share that with a handful of friends on Whatsapp and then see the user base explode to millions of people all over the world. In a nutshell, that is the story of Lex Daniels, co-founder of Relive. His platform, which lets casual cyclists or hikers turn their trek into a visual presentation, is still basically selling itself.
The birth of Relive
The story of the inception of Relive gets even better though. Its very first version wasn’t designed in some rundown garage, with founders toiling away in the late evenings after their day job. Relive was created on a relaxing summer evening in Tenerife, alongside a barbecue and some cold drinks. Lex Daniels was on holiday with his friends and had just completed a day-long bike trip when Relive was born.
“That morning, we descended to the coast and took a picture at the seaside”, Daniels remembers. “Next was 50 kilometres of climbing the mountains, followed by a beautiful descent. In the evening, we were having a barbecue and were looking at our stats for the trip.” Average speed, heart rate, altitude and whatever. They realised none of those accurately captured what they had experienced.
Flying over your accomplishments
“We thought about those visualisations they have in the Tour de France, where you fly over the track. That technology is out there, so let’s create something for that.” Despite being on holiday, they grabbed their laptops. A day later, they had a moving dot on a 3D landscape. Four months later, Relive launched.
Relive is an app that lets cyclists, runners and hikers visualise their accomplishments. Their trip is automatically turned into a slick 3D visualisation, complete with pictures and notes. The emphasis lies on sharing the story, rather than tracking stats, making it attractive to use for both casual and more serious users.
Founders dream team
It just so happened that the group of friends, pondering a new app by the barbecue, already consisted of a good team of founders. Relive co-founder Yousef El-Dardiry is a backend developer and experienced entrepreneur who founded several social media companies. Joris van Kruijssen took care of the design part, falling back on his experience as a freelancer and interaction designer for Fabrique.
Lex Daniels was at the time working at ABN Amro Bank as a data scientist. Their skills combined, meant they had everything on board to create an MVP and hit the ground running. “We’ve known each other since we were students and we did some minor projects together. We always had the idea that if we’d land on something good, we’d get into it together.”
Raising funding
Relive turned out to be that ‘something good’. It quickly grew from an idea to share with friends, into an actual company. “The first half-year we developed and ran it next to our day jobs”, says Daniels. “But it quickly became too much. The choice to quit was quite easy. We already had 100,000 users and all metrics were incredibly strong.”
Going at it full-time meant they had to look for funding. The three co-founders were pretty much a complete product team, says Daniels. “So with only a little extra development power, we came a long way. We had a clear roadmap.” With that roadmap in hand, they had raised €1.2 million by 2016.
Becoming a business
“From the start, we were mainly focused on the product”, says Daniels. “We figured, if we just make something that’s good we’ll end up alright. This worked for a while, but we noticed the 1.2 million was burning up fast. That’s when we started to look at Relive as a business. We started to investigate who our users were and how big the market was. Basically, after a year or two, we became entrepreneurs.”
Up until this day, Relive’s product is still selling itself and the company is growing organically. They currently have 13 million users worldwide. But Daniels’ ambitions reach beyond that. “I love the fact that, as an entrepreneur, I can set ambitious goals every year. We want to grow tenfold in the coming three years. That means the entire company is transforming.”
Looking or Series A
“We are now one hundred per cent a product-focused company, but if we want to grow we need to work on forming a community around the product. We currently still have zero marketing spend, which is going to change as well. The team will grow, we’re looking at adding 35 people at first. But eventually, we need about 100.”
Focussing on growth also means that, for the first time in its existence, Relive will invest in marketing. A couple of years too late, admits Daniels. “We’ve realised that marketing is a long effort. You need to spend a lot of time and energy. We’ve done some small things here and there, but not nearly enough. We should’ve started consistent efforts about two or three years ago.”
Expanding – or in this case; actually starting – a companies’ marketing efforts can be costly. That’s the reason Relive is currently looking for new funding. According to Daniels, Relive is in the middle of a serious Series A round with international investors.
‘A tough summer’
Closing that round would mean another chapter to Relive’s success story. It hasn’t always been smooth sailing though. Daniels remembers the summer of 2019 when cycling-app Strava cut the ties to their platform. “Relive started as an add-on to Strava and the cooperation was very successful. But when we started to use the community feed for Relive, Strava thought we encroached on their space too much. That was a tough summer.”
“Suddenly we needed to re-service half of our users. Our team did a stellar job and we managed to give everyone a soft landing”, says Daniels. In hindsight, he says, that might’ve been their best moment yet. “From that moment on, we decided to make our product solely for our users. Our gut feeling said we had to shift focus, but that was a tough choice to make. One we could only make because we had a clear vision. We managed to turn it into something positive.”
From the moment they cut ties with Strava, Relive could look forward. Daniels: “There is a massive group of hikers, cyclists and runners that are more casual about their activities. Many apps available focus on serious athletes, not on people who just want to get out, have fun and live a healthy lifestyle. Those people don’t want all those detailed statistics and technical analyses. And that group is about three times as large as the niche of athletes.”
Targeting that audience on a global scale means Relive has to ramp up its efforts. That’s why Daniels joined the Rise programme, organised by Techleap.nl. “I’ve been looking for a way to get in touch with peers for a while now”, he says.
Rise avoids ‘reinventing the wheel’
Rise proved to offer exactly that opportunity, as Relive got to touch base with industry experts as well as scaleups like Brenger, Fixico or Kaizo. “Many of these companies think they are unique, that common knowledge doesn’t apply to them. But with scaling up, expanding, recruiting they all face the same problems. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel on those things.”
There’s no time for that. In three years, Daniels says, he wants the company to employ 100 to 150 people. Mainly in the product team, but also in marketing and community-building. That last part is a way to make their product evolve. “Relive will become broader than it is now. Currently, it’s focused on capturing and sharing an experience. We want to shift that focus to the community, to inspiring and discovery. We aim to support people to find their next trip or adventure.”
Daniels already has somewhat of an idea of what his next trip is going to look like. That one holiday in Tenerife where Relive was invented has altered the way he enjoys his holidays. “Yeah, taking a trip means testing the product”, he laughs. On a more serious note: “We don’t determine our roadmap based on our own holidays though. We make this product for our users. It has to be perfect for them, not necessarily for us.”
01
From port to startup fort: How Lars Crama is ‘Making it Happen’ in Rotterdam