He says his hardest trip ever was a self-drive in Western Africa. Over a month, he crossed three countries. Road conditions were terrible and he kept hitting police checkpoints everywhere and at each point, he never knew if he would be arrested or released.
“It was a very hard trip,” says Troy Liu, the founder of new Chinese travel startup Mileslife, which wants to help consumers earn as many miles as he has over the last 15 years, points he has used to travel the world and have great adventures.
Troy Liu: Setting up Mileslife harder than road trip in Africa.
Yet he says that trip wasn’t as hard as setting up Mileslife, which won the Phocuswright India Innovation Award in February. He pitched it as a “miles earning machine in your pocket”, an app that allows consumers to earn miles in one place through partner airlines, hotels and restaurants.
“I didn’t know how many holes would be in front of me. Doing the business is definitely harder and it’s not as fun,” he laughs.
Therein perhaps lies the cautionary tale of turning your hobby – Liu’s was collecting airline points, travelling and writing about how to earn miles in blogs such as Boarding Area for point hunters like him – into your business, but then Liu would not have it any other way.
“It’s more complex than I expected but you know, I did nothing but earned miles for 15 years, I became an elite member of several airlines and hotels and I wanted to make more people like me. It’s taken me to so many good places, it was a hobby that kept me moving and I cannot have it as a hobby forever,” says Liu, who also acted as a consultant to airlines and hotels in China to help make their loyalty programmes interesting to Chinese travellers.
Mileslife is also his third startup “to do something with the miles concept” so with two failures behind him, you could say Liu is the persistent and resilient type.
“The first one was too early, I was too young. The second one had no business model – in 2012, the hot topic was tech tools, I was chasing the wave but there was no way to generate revenues. I was also doing airline consulting at that time – and so I wasn’t fully focused.”
As for all that talk of “failing fast” as most tech companies tell you to do, Liu says. “I didn’t. It took me six more months before I gave up on the second business.”
Now older “but not necessarily wiser”, he says, he feels his third attempt has a strong chance of taking flight. “It has been accepted by airlines and restaurants seem to like it,” he says.
I caught up with Liu in Singapore, a place he’s picked for the first overseas launch of Mileslife and it’s really the first country he feels he has a shot at building a consumer-facing brand.
All Liu’s experience bundled into one app
“People in Singapore already understand the idea of points and almost everyone uses it – unlike China, where there’s still a lot of education to be done. It’s also a smaller market and as the first mover, I feel it has a good chance of success.”
Mileslife is his attempt to bundle all his experience into one app. “I travelled to 100 countries but I didn’t have one app I could use for the different countries. I kept having to switch apps. So I bundled all three together – help consumers earn miles, give them shortlist of the best picks of places to eat and for airlines, it’s a chance to earn ancillary revenues.”
He knew that he needed to have Mileslife attached to daily life activities like dining to increase user engagement.
“Singapore Airlines (which is a partner), for instance, does not have local merchants outside Singapore. This app allows them to go beyond their country limit.”
Mileslife was launched in China in March 2016 with five airline partners – Air China, China Eastern, China Southern, Hainan Airlines and British Airways. Following that, Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa and United joined up.
In total, it features 10 airline loyalty programmes and 1,200 restaurants and other services such as hotels, spas, recreational activities, even visa applications across seven cities in China. Mileslife, in both Chinese and English, has about 110,000 downloads. Transaction value ranges from US$1 for breakfast to $20,000 for a hotel booking in Maldives, he says.
The challenge is to get people who download to use the service. “Once we manage to do that, they will stay a user.”
Liu is building a localised product for Singapore and is aiming for 2,000 restaurants. “I hear there are 8,900 restaurants in Singapore.” Its pilot launch involves 20-30 restaurants and it’s testing user behaviour.
As for marketing the app, Liu is counting on airlines to promote it through their channels and Mileslife will also do targeted marketing at influencers.
He expects to achieve about 500,000 customers, possibly going up to 1m eventually. “It’s a general public product, we do not take anything away from you as a consumer, and travel and dining is in everybody’s day-to-day life in Singapore. There’s higher awarenss of airline loyalty miles in Singapore, while China is still behind.”
Liu is aiming for restaurants in Singapore like these in Clarke Quay (Image credit: AhLamb/iStock)
Mileslife was started by Liu and two co-founders with private funds. So far, US$1 million has been invested and it has 42 staff. “We may raise more funds to accelerate expansion, we feel our model is highly scalable and it is interesting that within the airline industry, there’s been rarely a consumer-facing startup.”
After Singapore, Liu hopes to tackle the tourist markets in Southeast Asia so that Singaporeans travelling abroad can earn miles and use the service to eat at local restaurants in those places.
“What we are doing now is what airlines have been looking at for 30 years – how to deal with individual merchants in individual categories. Our mission is to activate the members for the airlines.”
Why it has been harder than expected is because “there’s no similar product out there. We don’t know what to do in terms of operations and marketing, so we need to figure out how to tackle the holes in front of us on our own, the hardest being marketing and merchant management.”
In other words, a bit like his self-drive across Western Africa but, as he says, harder.