Imitation simply wasn’t enough: A Wimdu post-mortem | EU-Startups
Summary
The usual storyline goes like this: an entrepreneur spots a popular web-based platform, looks for another market or location ready for a similar service, and launches a copycat company. Wimdu was on the path to fast growth — online for less than 100 days, it already had 10,000 properties worldwide and was available in 15 languages, including English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch. Later that same year, Wimdu backtracked from its aggressive growth strategy, closing activities in its offices overseas and moving some of its employees back to Berlin headquarters. Wimdu saw some positive developments in 2015 when it inked a media for equity deal with Mediaset, getting millions of investment in terms of advertising in the Italian conglomerate’s TV channels and leading to expansion in Italy, Spain and other Southern European countries. And in a further stroke of changing ownership for Wimdu, in February 2018, Wyndham Worldwide sold Novasol to PE firm Platinum Equity for a reported $1.3 billion.