Mário Mouraz, like many entrepreneurs, knew early on that he wanted to start a business and had personal interests that would eventually be the inspiration for businesses to come.
After studying Management in Lisbon for his bachelor’s degree, Mário earned a master’s degree in Hospitality Management. He then worked at a number of jobs and internships before diving into the startup scene.
From the time I was at university, I knew I wanted to set up my own company, but I thought that it would happen when I was 32 with kids.
His interests in travel and tourism became the basis for the three companies he’s founded since.
In 2013, he founded Travel with Mario, a website that sold digital travel guides for European cities and provided a blogging platform which aimed to inspire potential travelers. In 2014, he founded Trip Dashboard which aimed to help tourists companies optimize what they offered, using tourist data to make visualizations of tourism indicators.
Working on Trip Dashboard, Mario had the experience of talking to hundreds of hoteliers, which helped him think of the product for his most recent and most successful venture, Climber.
I understood that they were missing a tool that would price their rooms automatically according to market offer and demand. Such a tool was inexistent or unaffordable in the market for the majority of hotels, so I decided to create it.
In the summer of 2015, Mouraz graduated from the Lisbon chapter of the Founder Institute, and now, Climber, founded in 2015, offers independent hoteliers that missing tool that Mouraz had imagined.
(In this LinkedIn post, Mario explains why he would do the Founder Institute again.)
There’s no shortage of data for hoteliers, but before Cimber, independent hotels would be stuck looking at enormous spreadsheets. Climber is a cloud-based revenue management software, that takes data from external sources, such as weather, air traffic, online shopping, claims regarding a hotel’s reputation, and cross analyzes it with information from the hotel user, in order to provide — automatically — what to sell and how much to sell it for.
Climber also uses behavioral science to look look at customer segmentation. The company estimates that its innovations will save hoteliers time - up to 6 to 8 hours a week, and increase their revenues by 8-10%.
It earns money by charging hotels for a monthly subscription or by charging a commission based fee to resellers.
The company has signed a partnership agreement with a hotel software vendor that works with 7,000 hotels around the globe and hosted a Revenue Management seminar in Lisbon, where more than a hundred hoteliers attended. They’ve also strategically built a team with balanced competencies. Mouraz says that he learned from his early startups that building the right team is very important.
Graduates of the Founder Institute are creating some of the world's fastest growing startups, having raised over 2BN in funding, and building products people love across over 200 cities worldwide.
See the most recent news from our Grads at FI.co/news, or learn more about their stories at FI.co/journey.
