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DIGITALWORLD
Raven was where Coretime came from and the software for the hostelmarket came fromprogrammes we were writing at Raven,” he says.
THE WEB ARRIVES, NOLAN GETS GOING The arrival of the internet in the 1990s presented Nolan and his colleagues with a way of selling software to a bigger mar- ket. “We migrated to the web and instead of trying to sell copies of software for about five grand, we just started giving it away.We had probably sold all the copieswe could sell in Ire- land and it was really the end of the line by the time the web came along. “We knew straight away the power of the internet.We had
RAY NOLAN IS ARGUABLY IRELAND’S MOST SUC- CESSFUL INTERNET ENTREPRENEUR ANDWAS HO- NOUREDRECENTLYATTHEEIRCOMGOLDENSPIDER AWARDS WITH THE ‘INTERNET HERO’ ACCOLADE. Characteristically, Nolan was razor focused on the business, or businesses, at hand and was travelling overseas and could- n’t be there in person to collect his gong. Nolan is an enigmatic figure.He is noted for his deft touch at
building successful software andweb businesses, aswell as his direct style and an unwavering attention to detail in building products. But if you ask himhow he does it, you sense he is ir- ritated by the question. There is nomagic, just common sense. “I’ma college dropout, I didn’t finish college and I taughtmy-
self programming. I startedmy first company Raven Comput- ing when I was 22, writing bespoke software and building databases.We started doing one-off products and built prod- ucts from there.” Ravenwas the incubation engine formany of the businesses
that followed, including time-billing software firm Coretime, which he sold to accounting giant Sage in 2004, and Web Reservations International (WRI), which he founded in 1999. The latter, which began as a booking engine for hostels, spawned sites
likeHostelworld.com,
Hostels.com and
Boo.com. Very quickly
Hostelworld.com grew to 12 million visitors a month and Nolan drove the business forward, returning US$500m on an initial investment of €130,000. His latest venture
isWorky.com,which he regards as a social
network for ordinary people who want to present their work credentials to the world. He also chairs a number of other in- ternet companies including cheap flights site Skyscanner and healthcare search
engineWhatClinic.com, and is a director of Smartbin, a provider of management software to the waste collection industry. “I’mknown for running two or three things at the same time.
56 INNOVATION IRELAND REVIEW Issue 3 Autumn/Winter 2011
built some software for the hostel market. When I address a market I try to solve problems. The way the hostel market worked in the 1990swas that people running hostelswould get an email based on a search someone did on Yahoo! and just maybe therewas a chance someonewould read that email and a booking was made, probably three days later. So we said, ‘Look, ifwe could connect people tomake immediate decisions and book live without talking to anybody, it might work’. It worked. “The hostel business was a highly inefficient business when
it came to online.We basically reapplied our intellect. Instead of trying to sell a big ticket item, which I always hated – a big ticket itembeing €5,000 – let’s just give it away for free.We’d make money if they sold beds. “We started writing code in March 1999. We were in four
countries by Christmas and we were in 12 countries within a year. It was 2001 before I began working full-time on it and we recruited TomKennedy, a hostel owner, to run the business. It was an entire industry that was screaming out for technology. Before we knew it we were live in 100 countries.” Building the business involved some strategic risk taking,
such as buying competitors as well as domain names like
Boo.com and
Hostels.com. It also led to some clever breakthroughs, including setting a
web industry standard. “We were the first people to do online hotel reviews, before Tripadvisor or anybody else. We dared to think that an Irish companywould go and do something that would become the standard for the internet. “You just think big.We created reviews because hostels did-
n’t have a star rating system. We sent out a load of emails to hostel owners about it. I remember designing and writing out how we’d do it and we came up with five different headings – character, security, location, form and staff – and let people rate them from one to five.We said we’d change the headings before launch but never got round to it.” One of Ireland’s key attributes as a nation is its customer
service, Nolan believes. “The best thing about Irish people is their ability to be liked, and we’re kind of pragmatic when it comes to solving problems. The customer service as a nation is phenomenal. “AtWRIwhatwe learnedwas to put a personal touch to cus-
tomer service. When any one of the thousands of hostels we serve rings in with a problem they always had a buddy, one
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