From a Start-Up to a Market Leader
With E-GUMA, Idea Creation GmbH has specialised, as one of the first companies in Europe, in software solutions for vouchering. What started with first projects in 2005 resulted, via STARTUPS.CH, in the 2009 foundation of an official company. With more than 600 successfully implemented projects and several thousand companies using the system on a daily basis, E-GUMA has, in the meantime, become a leader in the market for vouchering systems.
Idea Creation GmbH team
In 2005 Hans Ulrich Gerber, a hotel manager at that time, wanted to sell his company’s vouchers online and come to grips with the chaos of his manual voucher management. As he could not find any solution on the market, he asked his son Martin Gerber whether the latter could develop such a tool for him. They created a concept together. The idea of a voucher management system was born.
It quickly became clear that a veritable market niche had been found, but a successful market launch seemed quite challenging. On the one hand the cost per project was very high, but on the other e-commerce still remained completely in its fledgling stage. The need had not been recognised by many potential customers yet. However, first projects could already be implemented. Very soon it became obvious that a completely new system would have to be developed to make E-GUMA more professional and capable of supporting a larger number of customers. With the help of Christoph Thomet and Daniel Thomet, both software developers, the system could be brought anew to the market, this time in the form of professional cloud software. With a relaunch of the new E-GUMA in 2009, a separate company was also founded via STARTUPS.CH.
In the initial phase a lot of persuading, contacts, personal visits and sales pitches with relatively little success is needed. At first basic references has to be eked out. However, when the product is good, persistence pays off. From the very beginning it could be felt that our customers were excited about our vouchering system. For the first time E-GUMA made it possible to sell vouchers via your own online store so that customers could compose vouchers themselves, directly pay for them and print them out at home. All data is organised by sophisticated voucher management software that works in the background. Active recommendations returned increasingly more customers, leading finally to winning Milestone Award, Switzerland’s most important tourism award.
Today E-GUMA customers include leading companies from the hospitality, catering, cable car, navigational, sport, zoo, circus, tourism organisation, retail and many other industries. With an E-GUMA ticket system, which enables efficient event and ticket booking, in 2015 a new product could be successfully launched onto the market.
E-GUMA has always been something more than mere software: a growing team of tourism experts, hoteliers, restaurateurs, IT specialists, marketing professionals and graphic designers advise and support their customers in all respects as far as vouchers and tickets are concerned, and all this round the clock. This is certainly also an important tip for other start-ups: good service is the best marketing.
Visit www.e-guma.ch to learn more about the E-GUMA voucher and ticket system.
