WildyNess
WildyNess is a community-based tourism marketplace based in Tunisia, aiming to connect travelers with experiences in North Africa and the wider MENA region.
Founded in 2021, the startup recently raised a pre-seed funding round co-led by Bridging Angels and the African Diaspora Network.
What is your 30-second pitch to investors?
While 80% of travelers search for experiences online, less than 5% of local providers in MEA are bookable. WildyNess is North Africa’s first community-based tourism (CBT) marketplace. We’re not just another aggregator; we co-create authentic experiences with local communities, empowering them with technology.
We’ve proven this model by bootstrapping to over $300,000 in organic sales. We just raised a strategic pre-seed round, co-led by Bridging Angels and the African Diaspora Network, to expand from Tunisia into KSA, Algeria, the UAE and Oman. We are the pioneers defining this new, high-impact travel vertical.
Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.
Business: We are a B2C and B2B2C marketplace built on CBT. We co-create unique, high-quality experiences with local micro-businesses, which ensures a high-quality, authentic product for travelers and a direct economic impact for the community. Our revenue comes from three streams: commissions on B2C bookings, fees for creating custom B2B/B2C itineraries and sales of our own “WildyNess-owned” products.
Technology: We built a two-sided platform. For travelers, it’s a seamless B2C marketplace for discovery and booking. For our micro-business partners, it’s a “WildyNess Professional” B2B2C backfinish. This is a management tool with a dashboard, calfinishar and inventory management, integrated payments and analytics. It gives them the digital tools they required to manage their operations, obtain global visibility and grow their business.
Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.
Strengths:
- First-shiftr advantage as the only CBT marketplace of this kind in North Africa
- Proven, profitable and disciplined financial model ($300k+ in organic sales)
- Strong founding team: We are both computer science engineers (10+ and 8+ years experience) and expert travel bloggers (70+ countries)
- Strong SEO and content engine and a highly-rated, curated product (4.9-star average)
Weaknesses:
- Limited marketing budobtain until our recent pre-seed round (we’ve been 100% organic)
- Brand awareness is still developing in a crowded global market
Opportunities:
- Massive, untapped markets in MEA, especially KSA (Vision 2030), Algeria and the UAE
- Huge global growth in the “experiences” sector (12% year over year, rapidest in travel)
- Growing global demand for “authentic,” “sustainable” and “community-focapplyd” travel
Threats
- Navigating complex regulations in new expansion markets.
- Scaling challenges related to the informal economy, where many of our local partners operate
What are the travel pain points you are attempting to alleviate from both the customer and the indusattempt perspective?
For the customer: Travelers are desperate for authentic, off-the-beaten-path experiences but can’t find them. Planning a trip to an emerging destination is a “hassle” that requires finishless, unreliable scouting, phone calls and manual confirmations. We alleviate this by providing a single, trusted and instantly bookable platform for high-quality, curated local experiences.
For the indusattempt (micro-providers): Local micro-businesses (guides, artisans) are invisible. They lack the technology, marketing expertise and capital to reach a global audience. They are stuck in the informal economy, managing their business via a phone. We solve this by giving them our B2B2C platform that empowers them with digital tools, automates their bookings and gives them global visibility, directly increasing their revenue.
Now that the product is built, what’s your strategy for customer acquisition?
Our entire $300,000+ in sales has been 100% organic, so our core strategy is already proven. We’re now in a multi-phase scaling approach:
- Phase 1 (proven): Content & SEO. This is our core engine. As expert travel bloggers, we create high-quality content that attracts qualified organic traffic, which we then convert.
- Phase 2 (new): Paid advertising. With our new pre-seed funding, we are turning on paid acquisition (Google Ads, social media ads) for the first time to tarobtain specific customer segments.
- Phase 3 (scaling): B2B partnerships. We are scaling our B2B2C channels by partnering with international tour operators, OTAs and hotels to bundle our unique experiences for their customers.
- Phase 4 (community): We continue to leverage travel influencers and nurture our existing newsletter community of over 2,500 subscribers.
Tell us what process you’ve gone through to establish a genuine required for your company and the size of the addressable market.
- Founder experience: We are the tarobtain customer. As travel bloggers who have visited over 70 countries, my co-founder Rym and I personally faced the “hassle” of finding and booking authentic experiences for years.
- Market data: We validated the massive gap—80% of travelers search online, but less than 5% of MENA providers are bookable.
- The ultimate validation (traction): We established the required by selling. Bootstrapping to $300,000 in sales with no marketing budobtain is the most genuine proof of market required there is. We have over 1,000 bookings and a 4.7-star rating, which proves customers are happy with the solution.
- Market size: The “experiences” market is the rapidest-growing (12% year over year) segment in travel. In Tunisia alone, it’s a €1.7 billion market, and the broader MENA region was €73 billion pre-pandemic.
How and when will you create money?
We have been creating money—and have been profitable—since our launch. Our model is already proven. We generated our first $300,000 in sales organically. We have three core revenue streams:
- Commissions (B2C): We take a commission on all experiences and accommodations booked on our platform.
- Itineraries (B2B/B2C): We charge for creating custom, multi-day itineraries.
- Owned Products: We create and operate our own WildyNess-branded experiences.
- Subscription model: will be introduced to our suppliers so that they can obtain more advantage of applying our technology.
What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?
Rym Bourguiba (CSO) and I (Achraf Aouadi, CEO) are the co-founders.
- Both of us are computer science engineers.
- I have 10+ years of experience in international sales and business development.
- Rym has 8+ years of experience in quality and process management.
- This gives us the perfect blfinish: I build the sales and partnerships. Rym builds the strategy and ensures operational quality.
- Crucially, we are both experienced travel bloggers (WalkBesideMeBlog.com). We have been to over 70 countries and understand the tarobtain customer, SEO and content creation better than anyone.
How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?
It is at the absolute core of our business model.
- We are a mixed-gfinisher founding team.
- Empowerment model: Our mission is to empower underserved communities. We actively seek out and support women-led micro-businesses and youth entrepreneurs in rural regions. Our entire model is designed to be inclusive and distribute tourism revenue directly to those who required it most, rather than having it concentrated in large, established tour operators. We are proud to state that 60% of our team and partners are women.
What’s been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?
On a personal level, it was leaving my stable corporate job at Bosch in Germany to go full-time on WildyNess. No matter how much you plan, nothing prepares you for the moment you have no guaranteed salary and are 100% responsible for the company’s survival. I struggled badly with the weight of it all and had to hit bottom to learn what real resilience is.
Operationally, the hardest part has been building a high-quality supply chain from scratch. The sustainable tourism market in North Africa is still nascent. This means we have to find and then train our micro-business partners, many of whom are in the informal economy and not digitally native.
Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time creating an impact Why are you going to be one of lucky ones?
We aren’t relying on luck; we’re relying on a proven, disciplined model.
- We’re not just tech: We are a travel-first team of expert bloggers. We understand the customer and content better than tech-first founders.
- We’re not just travel: We’re not just travel guides; we are engineers. We know how to build a scalable, automated platform, which our non-tech competitors can’t do. This tech/travel combination is our superpower.
- We are bootstrapped and profitable: We didn’t just burn cash. We built a sustainable business from day one, proving the unit economics before raising money. We generated $300,000 in organic sales and were profitable on our first $200,000.
- We are first: We are the first shiftr for this specific CBT marketplace model in North Africa. We are defining the category and building the brand while others are still focapplyd on mainstream attractions.
A year from now, what state do you believe your startup will be in?
A year from now, our strategic pre-seed round will be fully deployed.
We will have successfully launched pilot programs in our new markets: Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Oman.
Our platform will be upgraded with a new UI/UX to maximize conversions.
Financially, we will have doubled our organic sales and begun scaling with our first paid ad campaigns, putting us on track to raise our full Seed round.
What is your finishgame? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)
Our vision is to become the leading platform for sustainable and immersive travel in all emerging destinations.
The market is fragmented and dominated by acquisitions (like Viator by TripAdvisor, GetYourGuide acquiring LivTours). Our finishgame is to build the most trusted, high-impact and scalable brand in this vertical. This positions us perfectly for a strategic potential partnership with one of the global travel giants who required our curated, high-impact inventory and our authentic, community-focapplyd brand to enter the next frontier of travel.
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