IAM520- Serial Entrepreneur Offers Walking Tours in 90 Countries

Juan Castillo is a serial entrepreneur from Spain, who has bootstraped 10 online projects so far, and now runs GuruWalk, the biggest community of free walking tour guides in the world, with a team of 15 people in their offices in Valencia, Spain, and 2000 guides in 90 countries offering this kind of “pay-what-you-want” walking tours.

• CEO Hack: Having research and negotiation skills
• CEO Nugget: Change my mindset
• CEO Defined: Constant challenges and learning

Website: https://www.guruwalk.com/

Twitter: twitter.com/juancastillo_es
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/juancastillolopez

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:30

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Juan Castillo of GuruWalk.

Juan, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Juan Castillo 0:39

Yeah, thank you very much. Seriously I am really happy to be here.

Gresham Harkless 0:43

Definitely. Super excited to have you on. What I want to do is just read a little bit more about Juan so you hear about all the awesome things that he's doing.

Juan is a serial entrepreneur from Spain, who has bootstrapped 10 online projects so far, and now runs GuruWalk, the biggest community of free walking tour guides in the world, with a team of 15 people in their offices in Valencia, Spain, and 2000 guides in 90 countries offering this kind of “pay-what-you-want” walking tours.

Juan, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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Juan Castillo 1:13

Yeah, I am ready.

Gresham Harkless 1:14

Let's do it. I wanted to kick everything off with what I call your CEO story to hear a little bit more about your background and what led you to start your business.

Juan Castillo 1:23

I studied architecture, it was a very different field. I was like, really, really bothered with computers. I was the only one in my class who couldn't even install the antivirus on my laptop. I was like really lame on that and then the marketing has been changed a lot. For architects, it was almost impossible to find a job. I was struggling and I thought that yeah, I should change and maybe think that the last five years were lost. But starting in a different field, that we're rolling more where the offer on-demand was better for me.

I discovered about e-commerce and I started to think about online businesses. I did an e-commerce Store, which was this easy one the drag-and-drop e-commerce store. Another one, well, the debate about it with that money, I started another company, another project, which was also a marketplace like GuruWalk, and it became the leading marketplace of that market in Spain. That gave me a lot of money, like hundreds of 1000s of euros in revenue, and with that money I reinvested, like instead of buying a house or buying a car, as everybody will do, I just reinvested it in many other reasons like really crazy businesses and brilliant business, and all of them fail. I lost everything.

After that, after one of my biggest failures, I decided to start coding. I spent 12 months coding and learning at the end, I was learning also machine learning on AI. I was one of the organizers of an important conference about AI at MIT in Massachusetts. But in the end, I felt that I wanted to start, like my last project, I wanted to do a great project. I was thinking, okay, which field will be the best or which opportunity will be the best for me to try to do, a really big project that will impact the whole world? We'll be good enough to compete with, with maybe some competitor from the US who will raise 10 times more money than me. I discovered this feeling about free walking tours in a very funny way.

I had a flatmate in the past and he was struggling to pay his rent, his rent was 150 euros per month, so it was nothing. He was a photographer, and I called him I told him, Hey, Mark, how are you doing? How is your life in Berlin? He told me like one of the best jobs in the world. What's that? He said I'm a free walking tour guide. What the hell is that? I don't know that. So he said, I just walk people around the lane, I sold them the most important things about the city. In the end, they pay me whatever they want. I said, Can you live with that? The more money that I spend that I earn, the less I earn more than 3000 euros per month. I said, Wow.

I started this NGO, researching that and I saw that people were looking for this kind of tour, in many, many like 1000s of candidate cities in the world. I saw that there were people with the potential to become great, free-walking tour guides. So this marketplace, I thought that they would make a lot of sense. Now it's been a great success. It's been spreading around the world and we're very happy about that.

Gresham Harkless 5:11

Nice. I appreciate that and it sounds like you have that entrepreneurial DNA because you keep wanting to invest in different businesses. Let me ask you, why didn't you decide to go and buy the house and the car? Did you want to kind of do these businesses? Was that just something that was just in you?

Juan Castillo 5:28

Well, at the beginning, since the second grade went too well. I thought that I was a genius and I would do like many businesses, and they would always succeed, successful and that wasn't true. I thought that with that money, I would do like, bigger and bigger businesses. It was easy but it wasn't. I got lucky the second time. The best thing about failures is things you learn make you get your feet on the ground again, make you humble, make you learn and that's the best thing about entrepreneurship, you learn the skills you develop.

Gresham Harkless 6:11

Yeah, absolutely. It led you to the Krieger wall because I just marvel at the ability to be kind of see those opportunities to hear how you're having a conversation with somebody and you hear that, okay, you do what and then next thing. You start doing research and you're like, oh, wow, this, everybody's looking for this. Then all of a sudden you start to create a business from that. Can you take us through a little bit more about Guruwalk? Can you take us through exactly some of the cities and countries that you're in and exactly how everything works?

Juan Castillo 6:39

Well, we are in 90 countries, and we are in more than 600 cities. However, if you're traveling mainly to Europe, or maybe South America, Lima, Alana, and Kuba, you just type a city, and probably we are there. We have spread in many countries and many cities already. So we are very happy with that. But what was the question here?

Gresham Harkless 7:07

Yeah, how does it work and everything if people are listening?

Juan Castillo 7:10

Yeah. So imagine that you are totally in maybe to Lima, Peru, Budapest, Hungary, Paris or Rome. You search the city, and you see all the tools that we have and go to work like all the Google works. You see which one you like most, and you just book and put your name on the booking with one click. You attend to that tool at an automated point in time, and that person gives you a tour of the most important things that he or she thinks you have to know about the city.

After the end, till then you have to have to pay anything. In the end, you just pay whatever you want. It's pay what you want walk into it. What this concept means is that you have the power to decide how much value you are receiving, but also it aligns the guides, to keep putting a lot of effort into delivering a great quality, great experience, and doing super fun, super entertaining. So it's not that boring to walk into, like, oh, with a microphone on the telly in the boring seat. Now it's super, super funny, and super entertaining because guys want to earn their stripes. In the end, it's a completely different experience and people love it.

Gresham Harkless 8:31

Yeah, that makes so much sense. It's kind of like a performer, it's like this is your stage and you want to be able to give the greatest performance ever. Because you will get the monetary benefit, they will pay you based off of that. But it just gives that opportunity for you to be more engaging, you need to be funny, and you to figure out what people want to see or what they want to know. Then it's all kind of focused on the consumer, the visitor the person that's setting up and doing the tour.

Juan Castillo 8:54

Exactly but also on the other side. If you have a background in history, culture, and all that other stuff probably you don't have a good-paying job. Maybe you can sign up and go to work and become a guide and show the best things about your city. Or maybe you want to move to a different country and live in that city in Europe, and you want to study and know all the most important things about the city and show it to other people. You can earn a lot of money by doing that. Is this a two-sided business? You can also sign up and become right.

Gresham Harkless 9:30

Okay, so you can sign up if you have expertise or even if you want to learn more, get a guess about it, and be that kind of go-to person you can sign up to do that as well.

Juan Castillo 9:40

You can do it in New York, in your hometown, wherever. We are open to all the cities in the world.

Gresham Harkless 9:47

Awesome. I love that anytime you're able to kind of connect to groups of people that you know are traveling to an area and don't know what's around and then somebody who doesn't know and can be that tour guide and allow everybody to win. I love it when those two things kind of come together, so, an awesome platform. Let me ask you this, and you might have already touched on this, what do you feel is like your secret sauce, or your thing that sets you apart or makes Goober Walk unique?

Juan Castillo 10:11

Well, the most important thing about the world of work is that we are the biggest platform. In the end, you want to research which stores are the best. In the end, the best place to look is will work. This is a marketplace. So you have to understand the business model of the marketplace. So the most important thing about our marketplace is to become an activity leader. If you are unaware, maybe you can be a leader in a city or different cities. But in our case, since you like the good thing about marketplaces is that the customers repeat a lot of times. If you live in San Francisco, and you start Uber, just in San Francisco, maybe you will repeat it taking Uber three times per week, or five times per month or something, but you are not going to travel 10 times per month to New York.

You will travel to different cities. In the end, for us, the most important thing is to become leaders internationally. It's the biggest challenge other than the biggest opportunities, the bigger opportunity. But the most important thing for a successful company idea, I think it's two things. First is researching, well the market. You can find a small niche in which the competition is not so strong. And you feel that you can lead that small market, but also that you think that that market will grow.

You can you can lead that market and grow with it. In the end, you want to find this kind of blue ocean. That's one part and the other part for sure, if you want to build a great company, it looks like a buzzword. It's really important. It's like how can you achieve to make a great team and a great team, it's made of great people and but also great interactions between those people, and keep them motivated, keep them engaged, keep them energized, keep them grow and keep them learning. So there are those two things good research before starting the company and building a great team. Those two things are difficult, but I think it's the most important thing.

Gresham Harkless 10:27

Appreciate that. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be an app, book, or habit that you have. But what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Juan Castillo 12:45

It could sound easy, or sillier. I think that the best hack is just a sales or under-negotiation course. Because some people think that selling is just about being nice or having good people skills. It's not, because there is a lot of research out selling and our negotiation. It's been done for many years. You can just take those techniques, apply them, and get them in your head. You can do them naturally. So you will get much better results with those schools. It's a great investment of your time.

Gresham Harkless 13:29

Absolutely. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. This is a word of wisdom or a piece of advice or if you can hop into that time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Juan Castillo 13:40

Yeah, well, the biggest challenge for an entrepreneur is their emotional things like emotional battles, because you have a lot of stress and a lot of anxiety. You have anxiety, by definition is the fear of the future, because you are making decisions that you do not know how will end up. That creates a lot of anxiety. Yeah, so the best hack, the best trick that I found about that is reading the stoics because it helps you change your mindset a lot, and doing that your your targeting goal, it's not like selling the company to that valuation or earning that amount of money. Now, your goal in life becomes to achieve the ability to write, but at the same time, it helps you focus on the things that you can control above it.

Gresham Harkless 14:41

Now I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO and we're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on this show.

So what what does being a CEO mean to you?

Juan Castillo 14:52

Constant challenges and constant learning for sure.

Gresham Harkless 14:57

Yeah, absolutely. When we were talking about how you got started in different ventures that you have and the thing that drives you. I think that if you understand that failure is not failure, it's only failure if you stop, if you continue to go on and say, Hey, this is a learning opportunity. It's a learning experience.

The next time I do something, I'm going to be even better at it because I had that bump in the road. But if you keep going, then it's hard to not be successful.

Juan Castillo 15:21

Yeah, exactly.

Gresham Harkless 15:23

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Juan. I think you're doing some awesome things. I appreciate that definition, appreciate your time. What I wanted to do was pass you the mic just to see if there's anything additional, you can let our readers and listeners know. Then of course, how best they can get ahold of you and then find out about guru walk.

Juan Castillo 15:39

Well, yeah, they got it for sure. If you're traveling, just type Google walk on Google, and you will find awesome guides. If you're starting a business just never give up and keep trying. Yeah, best of luck. For all the community. I'm for you with your channel and your community.

Gresham Harkless 16:00

Thank you. I appreciate that. We will have the link and information in the show notes so that everybody can follow up with you. Appreciate you my friend and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Outro 16:08

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

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Thank you for listening.

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