{"id":232,"date":"2012-10-25T14:23:47","date_gmt":"2012-10-25T14:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/?p=232"},"modified":"2012-10-25T14:23:47","modified_gmt":"2012-10-25T14:23:47","slug":"startup-profile-foto-ruta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/startups\/startup-profile-foto-ruta\/","title":{"rendered":"Startup profile: Foto Ruta"},"content":{"rendered":"
This is the first in a series of profiles about startups.<\/em><\/p>\n Foto Ruta<\/a> is an energetic, young company that offers creative ways for travelers to explore a city while becoming better photographers. Get a taste of their flagship tour by reading about my experience<\/a> from last weekend. In addition to the weekly tour that covers a different neighborhood each Saturday, Foto Ruta offers a set of creative photography options in Buenos Aires: half day and full day street photography excursions<\/a>, a half day\u00a0iPhoneography tour and workshop<\/a>, a full day post-production workshop on learning Adobe Photoshop Lightroom<\/a>, as well as custom excursions<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Founded by Joss Mandryk and Becky Hayes, two expats living in Buenos Aires, this company is much more than the typical expat starts a walking tour business\u00a0<\/em>that you see everywhere.\u00a0Foto Ruta is prepping to go international with franchises in New York and Santiago, Chile in the works. Plus, they planning an iPhone app.<\/p>\n The founders’ backgrounds are visible in the success of the company. Joss is a graphic designer and photographer, and Becky comes from a career as a Marketing and PR Director. That combination is evident in their extremely well design marketing materials:<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n To gain a better sense of what drives Foto Ruta, I talked with co-founder Becky Hayes.<\/p>\n What was the spark that gave you the incentive to start this specific company?<\/strong><\/p>\n We’re both expats living in Buenos Aires and started off as tourists. We fell in love with Buenos Aires but found that tourists who were here for only a few days often missed out on what was great about the city. People who’d heard so much about the city, arrived, spent a few days visiting the main tourist sites and then went away bemused as to why Buenos Aires got such rave reviews from travellers. In other words, it’s a city that requires a bit of time to really appreciate.<\/p>\n We wanted to offer a way to show tourists the greatness of Buenos Aires, such as the crumbling architecture, secret restaurants, passage ways, street art, quirky street life. As photographers we are both aware of the way photography can be a great way of seeing<\/em> a place and hunting out the unexpected. And so we came up with a concept that would fuse the two…tourism and photography!<\/p>\n Foto Ruta has a solid momentum going, which is hard to achieve in a young company.\u00a0What was a challenge that you had to\u00a0overcome to get the company on course?<\/strong><\/p>\n I’d say as with most start-ups the biggest challenges were financial. We started Foto Ruta with a miniscule pot of money with the hope of growing organically, so we had to work really hard to prioritise expenditure. With our combination of skills we were able to launch the company without having to make huge investments in design\/programming and marketing. Foto Ruta managed to get a momentum going fairly quickly towards the end of 2011, which was great but it meant that we grew quite quickly, and what we planned was originally going to be a part time set up, became a full time job (while we were both still having to juggle other full time jobs!). The balance between growing a new company and making it profitable whilst also earning a living is a tough one to manage.<\/p>\n You have a good mix of products that are well defined at varying price\u00a0points. \u00a0Do\u00a0you have any suggestions for other entrepreneurs on creating a slate\u00a0of products that offer value to different customer segments, AKA\u00a0product market fit<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n It’s definitely been a bit of a process of trial and error. We began with our lead product Foto Ruta Weekly<\/a>, a clue based tour that explores a different neighborhood each week. It was this product that we felt had a real unique selling proposition. It was totally unique to us, and, as it’s a tour that supports large groups. We rely on volume, so we can offer it at a very low price. This means it appeals to every type of traveller, and we find due to its uniqueness, it appeals to pretty much every customer segment from budget traveller through to the top end of the market. We also find due to the low price and the explorative\/fun nature of the events, it appeals to photographers and non-photographers alike. <\/span><\/p>\n