Daniele Calvo Pollino is the Co-Founder & CEO of Mapo Tapo, the Italian outdoor sports adventure marketplace where users can plan and book authentic experiences off the beaten track, handled by local guides and hosts.
Before becoming an entrepreneur, Daniele worked as a Product manager at Amazon in Italy and Luxembourg.
Daniele holds a Master’s in International Management from Bocconi and Fudan University.
In August 2020, you co-founded Mapo Tapo, the outdoor sports travel platform where users can plan and book authentic experiences off-the-beaten-track, handled by local guides and hosts. What prompted you to establish Mapo Tapo?
Daniele: Back in 2019, when I was working in Luxembourg for Amazon, I liked my job, but I realised it was not the job of my life, and I really needed to explore.
I had always wanted to launch a business on my own. And I felt it was the right time to do it. Funnily enough, it was a few months before the Covid-19 outbreak.
At that time, my co-founder and partner in life, Alessia Fontanari, was taking her MBA in Fontainebleau, France. So, we considered putting together our competencies and started thinking about business ideas.
We looked at industries ready for disruption where we had expertise. And that’s how the outdoor sports came out.
Initially, Mapo Tapo was supposed to be an outdoor sports hostel company worldwide. But then we figured out that this business would have required a lot of capital. So, we tried to understand the outdoor community’s problems and what kind of solution we can offer. And that’s how Mapo Tapo was born. We wanted to create a platform where outdoor sports enthusiasts could book experiences with certified guides and, at the same time, find adventure buddies.
Mapo Tapo is also a software solution through which certified guides can digitise their operations and collect and manage their bookings. Can you tell us more about the company’s business model?
Daniele: We started with rock climbing because it was a sport that Alessia and I knew very well. We were part of this community. We understood that the very first problem of the rock-climbing community was about people. On one side, we figured out that outdoor sports enthusiasts were struggling to find certified guides worldwide who could help them truly appreciate the locations where they practice their sports. On the other side, outdoor sports enthusiasts had difficulty finding adventure buddies. We mainly started to work around these two problems.
Only after we realised another significant problem could we help solve it, which is on the supply side. Certified guides were completely unstructured in managing clients and requests from outdoor sports enthusiasts. They didn’t have a digital infrastructure that could help.
Today, an outdoor sports enthusiast can go to mapotapo.com, find thousands of experiences in different outdoor sports, and book directly. At the same time, we provide certified guides with a digital infrastructure to manage their clients and experience requests.
Regarding monetisation, as long as the experience is confirmed with one or two bookings, we retain a commission of around 20%. If, within an experience, there are more than three bookings, we recognise to the guide his/her entire daily fare, and we retain all the rest.
We also monetise on the guide side. The guides can decide to pay a monthly subscription, which is about € 50. The subscription allows access to certain premium features of the platform, gives discounts, gives priority in the booking assignment, and allows guides to use the digital infrastructure we created to manage clients coming from the Mapo Tapo website and their clients coming from other channels.
What other results have you achieved until now? What are the development plans for the near future?
Daniele: The actual activity of Mapo Tapo started around two years ago.
We reached almost € 1 million in lifetime revenues. We created a community of 90k outdoor sports enthusiasts from 40 countries worldwide (Italy, but mainly the US, the UK, The Netherlands, and Germany), and we made traveling 1.5k of them. 95% of Mapo Tapo departures have international participants.
It was important to us to be international from the very beginning. But it was super tough. Even if we can leverage the passion of the enthusiasts, the major obstacle was the common language. Eventually, it paid out.
The vision of Mapo Tapo is to become the infrastructure through which the outdoor sports community can plan, book, and enjoy their passion.
We want to keep increasing the selection and onboarding of guides from all over the world. Now we are strong in South Europe in terms of supply side. And because we were able to create a pretty solid brand for outdoor sports enthusiasts, we are receiving many partnership requests from guides worldwide. But we need to improve our structure to onboard more guides faster and according to where people want to travel.
At the same time, we are working to provide guides with a complete digital infrastructure to manage their demands. That’s why we have plans to expand our tech team.
You participated in the second batch of the acceleration program of B4i – Bocconi for Innovation. Can you share your experience?
Daniele: Participating in the B4i acceleration program was instrumental in reaching the point we are today. I had always worked in corporations, and I didn’t have any experience building companies from scratch. The B4i team helped a lot in providing a structure.
Moreover, since we are dealing with outdoor sports, guides, certifications, insurance, etc., the legal part of the business needs to be structured correctly. B4i and the legal Department of Bocconi University greatly helped us in these aspects.
Finally, apart from the initial capital, B4i provided meaningful connections that helped us in terms of vision, product, and raising other capital.
What are the main challenges you experienced in creating and growing Mapo Tapo? What are your next challenges?
Daniele: I think one of the main challenges of the beginning as a founder is to sell your idea and vision to all stakeholders constantly, that is, customers, employees to onboard talented people, and investors to get capital from. At that time, sales were not part of my background. Getting an all-the-time sales mentality was, at the very beginning, a struggle. But, if you believe in your idea, you do as much as possible to learn it.
Another initial challenge was learning the founder role. As a founder, you need to figure out stuff. More importantly, when you have a team of people working with you, you need to become a role gap bridger in every aspect not currently covered within your team, which is exciting but challenging. Every time I begin a new activity, I remember to surround myself with the smartest people possible, way smarter than me.
But I believe that the biggest challenge, in general, is thinking big. This is extremely exhausting but fundamental. It’s easy to keep doing things as you are doing. But to grow, you must approach things and make decisions with a thinking-big mindset. The faster you bring this to the table, the better. It could save a lot of time going forward.
One last question. What is your vision for the sports industry in the near future?
Daniele: I think the sports industry, along with many other sectors, will be affected very much by technology, but passion will still be the industry’s soul. Therefore, I believe technology will play a major role in everything that goes around this passion. Technology will bring people more value while living their passion. It will make sports safer, bring more fairness, maximise excitement, limit the effort to organise an event, etc.
This is pretty much the direction we want to go with Mapo Tapo. For outdoor sports enthusiasts, we want to be the point of reference where they can find guides and locations to practice their favourite sports. For the guides, we want to be their digital infrastructure to manage passionate people.
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For more info on Mapo Tapo, visit: https://www.mapotapo.com/