Avanshor

Minan Vora built Avanshor out of his experience working in the tours and activities industry. He saw a clear gap: tour operators and activity providers lacked accessible online booking infrastructure. Most were small businesses—think surf shops in Mexico or local adventure guides—who needed a simple way to accept bookings and payments online without the complexity of building their own tech.

Before the official May 2019 launch, Avanshor spent 4-6 months in private beta. The team started lean: they deployed the entire platform for a single test customer, validated for two months, then opened up to a wider beta group. This careful approach involved a small founding team of three (with two engineers handling tech and one founder managing sales and operations), supported by outsourced developers.

The first customers came from Minan's personal network within the tours and activities space. "The initial few customers were relatively easier for us to get because I've had personal connects with them," he explained. After those first five users, growth shifted to referrals and word-of-mouth—beta users became advocates, speaking to others about the platform. By the time of this interview (roughly 9 months post-launch), they had scaled to 150 active paying customers.

The biggest insight came from early churn. In the first month post-beta, multiple customers left. Rather than guessing why, Minan's team made direct calls: "We just asked them about why they left in the first place." The answer was brutal but fixable: their onboarding was "screwed up." The target market—travel and tourism operators—weren't tech-savvy and found the platform confusing compared to tools they knew. Once they fixed onboarding, retention improved dramatically: 90% of customers who signed up in recent months remained paying customers, cutting monthly churn to 10%.

For growth channels, they leaned entirely on organic tactics: SEO (ranking for "online booking engine" and "travel booking portals" via blogs and eBooks), B2B review sites (G2 Crowd and TrustRadius), and referrals. They hadn't spent a dollar on paid marketing yet but planned to launch campaigns in the next 6-8 months.

Avanshor was generating $4,000/month ($25 average customer, 150 paying users) nine months after launch. But here's the bootstrapping secret: they were subsidizing the product with an agency called Aikhaal that did custom tech work for one-time clients. Aikhaal generated $400K in annual revenue—more than enough to pay the five-person team while Avanshor grew. "Revenue is still growing and it'll be a while before we can sustain ourselves through the product," Minan admitted. The pricing model was hybrid: $25 base plan, $49 enterprise plan with free bookings included, plus commissions on transactions (which made up about 20% of revenue). By design, this freed them from the pressure to raise capital, allowing them to focus on solving the onboarding problem and building product-market fit on their own timeline.