The Story Of Europe's Youngest Self Made Billionaire: Markus Villig
I'm sure we've all heard of the taxi app Bolt and most probably used it before, but did you know it was founded by Europe's youngest self made billionaire, Markus Villig when he was just 19 years old?
Happy New Week,
I recently found out that Europe's youngest billionaire is the founder of Bolt, 29-year-old Markus Villig. An Estonian entrepreneur and self-made billionaire. Markus’ story is incredibly inspiring and I'll share all about it in this week’s newsletter.
Growing up, Markus had always been interested in tech. He was heavily inspired by Skype as it was founded in his home country of Estonia in 2004, showing a technology business “could be launched from anywhere.” Markus’ older brother, Martin, was a software engineer for Skype and hosted Hackathon challenges that Markus would participate in, usually as the youngest participant. Martin was actually the one who gave Markus the idea of starting Taxify (now known as Bolt) after he used a web-based taxi ordering system on a work trip in Ukraine.
At age 19, Markus decided to drop out of college just after one semester of studying Computer Science because his ride-hailing app was taking off. His initial goal for Taxify was to solve Tallinn’s (Estonia) taxi problem. He always struggled booking taxis on busy Friday and Saturday nights, had to wait for ages for the taxi to arrive, and experienced poor customer service from the taxi drivers. All these factors led Markus to start Taxify and by 25 he was the youngest unicorn founder in Europe and had shown that Uber wasn’t going to win everywhere.
Markus was able to grow Bolt to where it is now by doing these three things:
Go where your competition isn't - Markus first started off in his city Tallinn, where Uber had no presence, and then decided to expand one city at a time. He decided to focus on the cities that Uber wasn’t really in. He decided to make Eastern and Central Europe, and Africa a priority as these were markets Uber hadn’t taken seriously as “they have bigger battles elsewhere.” This helped Taxify a lot as they had a huge head start in these markets over their competitors.
Solve a problem - make the world a better place.
Markus knew from an early age he wanted to start a company and build a product but was unsure what type of product or company it would be.
“The only things that were really, really clear for me was that it needed to be in technology, I really wanted it to be a consumer product. And it needed in some ways to make the world a better place. But other than that, I was pretty agnostic of which space to get into.” Markus Villing
He chose transportation, not only because he can’t drive, but because hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on transportation globally by consumers each year, and what they get in return isn’t good.
He first focused on creating the best transport app in Estonia. Then when expanding to different markets, he made sure he fully understood different local markets and the problems they faced so he could offer them tailored solutions to their problem. For example, Uber was already in Africa but they were only accepting credit cards, so he looked at other payment options and options such as cash. He also looked at driver recruitment, which is essential to growth. Uber used the same registration process and terms and conditions globally for drivers. This made it tough for potential drivers in markets such as Nigeria. By recognizing the needs of drivers, Taxify earned a 66% market share in Nigeria.
Stay lean and mean - Markus followed the lean start-up model. He kept his costs extremely low. He decided to gauge consumer interest to avoid the unnecessary use of resources in product creation and development. He wanted to sign up the riders and drivers before he committed to building the app. Markus went out himself in Estonia’s capital Tallinn to recruit taxi drivers in the early days of the business and sent out emails to students in his college about Taxify. Once he was able to sign up enough riders and drivers he knew he had an idea with great potential. He borrowed €5000 from his parents to develop the first version of the app, this was money they’d been saving for him to put toward his studies. He had to do a lot of convincing to get this start-up loan.
Competing with a big start-up like Uber isn’t easy, Bolt has been able to win over customers and outcompete Uber in some areas by offering lower transportation charges to make them more fair and accessible to their clients. Bolt app distributes promotional codes to its consumers, allowing them to take advantage of a fantastic deal. Bolt also charges a 15% commission to its drivers compared to Uber which charges 25%. So on some occasions, Bolt customers pay less and Bolt drivers earn more.
Uber is still the biggest player around but Uber has been around for much longer and was founded in Silicon Valley, the global center of technological innovation, which offers the best conditions for startups worldwide. Markus has done extremely well for himself, and Bolt is still in its early days and is constantly expanding. They have even moved into the food delivery business like Uber, with Bolt Food, They have currently launched in Estonia, the country where Bolt was founded, South Africa, and Lithuania and are working on expanding to different cities.