Instalment 2: Yannick's Story

As a kid, I yearned to travel. Today, I’m so proud to share that Slice’s smart savings product has helped over 70,000 customers access travel in a financially sustainable way.

As a kid, trips overseas were magical and treasured occasions. When our relatives returned from a trip, the whole extended family would gather to watch VHS tapes of their holiday. I remember crowding around the TV - feeling both excitement and longing. As a little kid I daydreamed about my first time on a plane - traveling to a faraway place and experiencing a different culture.

I got to take my first overseas trip when I was 12, and it was every bit as magical as I’d hoped. We got to make some VHS tapes of our own - complete with the unavoidable 10 minute block of Dad filming the inside of his shirt while we played on a beautiful beach.

At University, my thirst for adventure remained. I remember sitting in a bitterly cold (but happy!) share house with my girlfriend, Sarah. One day, we were huddled on the couch in front of a tiny electrical heater. We desperately wanted to escape to somewhere warmer.

I remember booting up Skyscanner and scrolling through pages of flights. Even though we both had part-time jobs, paying for flights would have drained a lot our savings in one go. With so many other bills to pay, it didn’t feel responsible to book a trip. “If only there was a way to split the cost into smaller increments - then we could put a little aside each month”, she mused. Why didn’t that kind of product exist, we wondered. We sighed and turned up the heater - but the thought stayed with me.

A few years later, I was working in the Strategy team at Commbank. One of my favorite projects involved better understanding our retail customers’ needs and helping them achieve their financial goals. I realized that my dream to travel wasn’t rare - hundreds of customers told me they were saving for a holiday. Travel was aspirational - a dream that kept people going through all the hard moments.

I also realized that banks didn’t have a good product to help people access travel in a financially sustainable way - all that’s available is a traditional savings accounts or high-interest credit cards. Remembering my conversation with Sarah, I thought - there ought to be a way to allow customers to book flights in advance at a fair price, and assist them to pay in manageable instalments leading up to their holiday.

This spark of an idea became a flame. Indeed, it became Slice, the company I co-founded with Farouk - my good friend and now business partner. Farouk and I had both done stints in the Hardships department of a bank, so we shared an insight about the opportunity to make travel more accessible, with a solution that didn’t put unsustainable financial strain on customers.

Yannick and Farouk

Our early days were scrappy. We both poured over The Lean Startup and treated it as our Bible. We would meet at Farouk’s apartment in Wentworth Point to brainstorm - he didn’t have a whiteboard so we wrote notes on a glass door. We made a janky landing page, designed some ads in Canva, and paid a Fiverr freelancer $50 to design a logo. I still remember our first customer - David, who was thrilled he could pay for his family of six to go to Samoa for a family reunion.

In those days, nothing was automated. We spoke to all our customers on the phone and booked their flights manually. On the long bus ride home from work, I would process payments one by one. We were exhausted working long hours after our full-time jobs, but stories like David’s kept us going.

Farouk was the first to quit his job and go all-in, and I joined him a few months later. Between us, we’ve had to take several more leaps of faith. We led our own pre-seed round; Farouk sold his house and I refinanced mine. When we lost 90% of our revenue due to COVID, we pooled our remaining savings and put more money into the business to launch in the US. Farouk writes about that in his Instalment here.

Today, I’m so proud to share that Slice’s products have helped over 70,000 customers access travel in a financially sustainable way. We’re live in Australia and the US, and it’s been extremely heartwarming to read so many customer reviews about how much being able to travel has meant to them.

We’re also excited to announce an inflection point in our growth - we’ve secured an additional $10 million for our debt facility from Roadnight Capital, and a $7.5 million Seed round led by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India and SEA). This capital will help us expand and improve our product, as well as scale our B2B product for travel agents - which allows them to offer our payment method to their customers.

As a founder that’s bootstrapped until this round, I must admit I’ve always been skeptical of the fanfare that surrounds fundraising announcements. The coverage rarely shares the blood, sweat, and tears - the first hundred flights we financed using our own credit cards, or the first thousand bookings I processed manually on the bus home from work.

Today’s fundraise announcement means so much - not because it’s a big number, but because it validates the business we’ve built, and propels us to the next phase - scaling Slice into a global company that makes travel more accessible for everyone.

If you resonate with our mission, follow Instalments by Slice for a behind-the-scenes look at the scrapes, scars, and secrets of building a company with the ambition to make travel accessible for everyone.

And if you want to get on board, check out some of our open roles!