What a bike tour business in Tirana taught me about pricing, reviews and letting go.
Bike Tirana started in 2024 with one bike. Today it has a shop in the Old Bazaar, a team of guides, routes to Durrës and Shkodër, and more than 1,100 reviews across GetYourGuide, Google Maps and Viator. It was profitable from day one, and now a manager runs it day to day.
Start smaller than feels serious
One bike was enough to learn what the second one should be. Every early mistake was cheap because everything was small.
Marketplaces for discovery, your own site for margin
Marketplaces bring strangers. Your website keeps the money. Use the first to fill the calendar and the second to make it worth filling. Reviews are the bridge: they're earned on the marketplace and they sell on Google.
Sell only what you can deliver
There was demand in seven languages. We only sold tours where a guide could do them well. One great review in your language beats ten tours in a language nobody on the team speaks.
You can't hand off a business that lives in your head.
Systems before managers
Shared schedules, an AI chat that answers the questions guests ask every day, a website that takes bookings at 2am. Once the work lived outside my head, someone else could run it. I keep the big decisions.