Rick Steves' Europe: Rick Steves

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.7 • 31.4K Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2021

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rick Steves spent the summer after high school backpacking through Europe on two dollars a day—sleeping on the floor, sneaking into museums, and subsisting on a diet of bread and jam. When he came home, he found people were hungry for tips on how to visit Europe on the cheap, so he began teaching classes, and was soon hawking a self-published guidebook out of his car. Eventually, he started leading minibus tours and hosting a travel show on Public TV, steadily growing his business even though he was giving away most of his content. Despite the challenges of the pandemic, his no-frills approach to travel has persisted as a powerful brand, with 70 guidebooks, an ever-popular travel show, and—in 2019—an annual revenue of $100 million.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:31.0	Did you sit down and say, okay, this is the strategy.
0:34.0	We're going to create a travel business and we're going to do all these different things.
0:38.0	Or do the things that eventually happen kind of just happen happen happen happen hazardly?
0:43.0	No strategy at all.
0:44.0	I never really wanted to look in the book and say, oh, now you have a CEO.
0:48.0	Now you have a CFO. I don't even know what that stuff is until it becomes apparent, oh, we need a guy to do this.
0:56.0	And then they go, yeah, that's called a CFO.
0:59.0	We're just kind of going, oh, that's why they have that.
1:02.0	From NPR, it's how I built this.
1:11.0	A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:18.0	I'm Guy Raazan on the show today, how Rick Steve's backpacked around Europe on bread and jam and a few dollars a day
1:27.0	and turned his passion for no frills travel into a $100 million brand.
1:34.0	Giving your products away for free doesn't sound like a winning business strategy.
1:45.0	In fact, it's one reason why most regional newspapers in America collapsed when media first went digital.
1:52.0	Because at the dawn of the internet age, most newspapers made their content available online for free.
1:59.0	And lots of subscribers wondered, why am I paying when I could just read it on the internet for nothing?
	...

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