Johannes Reck tells the GetYourGuide origin story with the embarrassing part first. "Here's a secret about GetYourGuide: our success is rooted in an epic failure," he wrote in a 2025 LinkedIn post looking back at fifteen years of building the company. In 2008 he and Tao Tao launched GetYourGuide as a peer to peer platform that matched student travelers with local student guides. They thought the idea was obviously good, so they rushed to build it and had a first website up shortly after. Two years later the platform had exactly five bookings. Three of them were placed by Reck's mother.

He is blunt about the reason. They did no market research at all. They never took the time to learn what travelers actually struggled with, what they preferred, or what they would pay for. In his words, they did not even know that they should have.

The strange part is that they went all in anyway. On June 1, 2009 the student project became a real business and Reck signed his employment contract. He had a PhD position waiting at ETH Zurich in biochemistry and neuroscience, and he had just finished his first three months at Boston Consulting Group. The financial crisis had hit and the job market was bad, so he had two safe options and walked away from both. His family thought he had lost his mind. GetYourGuide also started with five co-founders, a setup Reck now says he would be very hesitant to invest in himself. Four of the five were still at the company a decade later.

The turn came from an inbound phone call. A professional Swiss tour company rang to ask whether it could list its river rafting trips on the platform, and it was willing to pay for that. The whole product was built for individual student guides, not for professional operators, so the call forced a decision: stick to the plan, quit, or reinvent the thing. Reck and Tao Tao went to Italy for what was supposed to be a holiday and spent it doing the research they had skipped two years earlier. The professional tours and activities market turned out to be far larger than anything they had assumed. After two days of arguing they came back and scrapped the platform. Martin Sieber and Tobias Rein then spent eight months rebuilding the technology for professional suppliers.

That sequence is the anchor for the milestone recorded here. Reck dates the first launch to 2008 and says the first two years produced five bookings, three of them family, so there was effectively no paying customer base in that stretch. He dates the rebuilt product precisely: writing on the first day of 2020, he described GetYourGuide on January 1, 2010 as a small beta website that had been open to the public for a few weeks, put together during half a year of retooling the failed student service. We therefore count roughly 730 days, the two years the founder himself describes, from the 2008 launch to the start of 2010, when the company finally had a product built for paying customers and its first professional supplier on board. On that first day of 2010 the site got fewer than 100 visits a day, inventory came from a handful of early adopters, and there was about 20,000 euro in the bank, which was the founders' pooled savings.

Reck spent January 1, 2010 pitching an angel investor over coffee in East London. The investor listened for an hour and said no. Reck got food poisoning at a cheap Indian restaurant that evening, spent the night between a friend's sofa and his bathroom, then flew back to Zurich the next morning and went straight to work.

Everything ran off personal phones for a long time after that. Reck and Tao Tao competed over who could sell more experiences. All inbound customer service was routed to their own mobiles through Skype because it was the cheapest option, which is how a single digit team managed to offer support around the clock and how Reck ended up taking booking calls at 3am. Servers sat under the desks, and someone tripping over a power cord took the whole site offline. They taught themselves Photoshop, online marketing and code. Reck became CEO, he says, because he was the worst coder on the team, so the others told him to do everything else: supplier acquisition, marketing, customer service, all of it.

Those calls are also where the product came from. Search that worked, detailed itineraries, clear inclusions and exclusions, and above all better ways to find experiences worth traveling for. Obvious now, missing then.

2011 nearly ended the company. They discovered seasonality in travel the hard way, with the first seed money drying up and no reserve for the quiet months. They paused payments and stretched runway to the limit, working out of a first office that was an IKEA furnished kitchen with a borrowed red sofa where they held product meetings and hiring interviews. The first large venture round did not land until three years after 2010, and shortly before it they ran out of money completely and had to ask their families for a short term loan.

The compounding took a long time to show. In October 2025 Reck posted that GetYourGuide had been profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis for a year, with revenue approaching 1 billion euro over the previous twelve months. He confirmed afterwards that the company crossed both 1 billion euro in revenue and profitability in 2025, with 33 million experiences booked and more than 50,000 partners. In the first half of 2026 travelers booked over 18 million experiences and gross bookings grew 27 percent year over year. Sixteen years earlier the same company had five bookings, and three of those came from his mother.