How This Startup Founder Built a Travel Fintech Empire From Nothing — No Degree, No Network, No Fallback Plan

The Startup Bet That Cannot Be Undone

The startup journey is one of the most unforgiving paths a human being can choose to walk, and the founders who survive it are rarely the ones with the most resources — they are the ones with the deepest belief.

When you step into the world of startup building, you are not simply launching a product or chasing a market opportunity.

You are placing the largest bet possible on yourself, your vision, and your ability to hold the weight of uncertainty for longer than most people are willing to endure.

Khaled Maneri, co-founder and CEO of Selfbook, is a defining example of what it truly means to go all in on a startup with nothing but conviction and clarity of purpose.

Born in Algeria, restricted by geopolitics, and armed with no formal education in the Western sense, he did what most people only dream about — he moved straight to New York City and built something that changed an entire industry.

This article breaks down the exact mindset, pivots, and principles that powered that journey from immigrant survival jobs to fintech infrastructure that processes millions in travel bookings.

If you are building a startup right now and you are looking for a community of founders and creators who understand this road, flipitai is already helping people like you turn raw ideas into real outcomes.

The lessons here are practical, the story is real, and the startup principles embedded in this journey apply whether you are on day one or year five.

What It Means to Build a Startup With No Option to Fail

There is a version of startup culture that glamorizes failure as a badge of honor, and while resilience is absolutely essential, not every founder has the luxury of treating failure casually.

For an immigrant stepping into a foreign country with no safety net, no established network, and no educational pedigree recognized by the systems around them, the stakes are existential — not just professional.

The startup mindset that emerges from that kind of pressure is uniquely powerful because it eliminates the option of quitting before the question is even asked.

Every decision becomes both a doubt and a commitment at the same time, because the stubborn part of the founder’s character refuses to let uncertainty become an exit ramp.

What this teaches every startup builder is that belief is not a soft emotional asset — it is a structural one.

When your vision is consistent, when what you are delivering to the world is clear, the exact route you take to get there becomes secondary to the act of continuing to move.

This is the principle that powered the earliest stages of what would eventually become Selfbook — a startup that now provides the payment and booking infrastructure for some of the most respected hotels in the world.

The perseverance that hardship builds in a person is not a character flaw or a trauma response — it is the raw material of a startup founder who cannot be moved off their mission.

From the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue to a Startup That Rewired an Industry

There is a specific kind of inspiration that only comes when you encounter something so beautifully designed that it reorganizes your sense of what is possible.

Walking up Fifth Avenue for the first time and stepping inside the Apple Store — open twenty-four hours, filled with Macs available for anyone to use — was exactly that kind of moment for the founder behind Selfbook.

The obsession with product excellence, with design that respects the human being using it, became the north star for every startup decision that followed.

Because the Apple Store was accessible at any hour, it became a free classroom where design thinking was absorbed organically, without a tuition fee or a formal enrollment process.

This is a startup lesson that is often overlooked: your environment of inspiration matters as much as your formal training, and sometimes it matters far more.

The seed planted on that iconic New York street eventually grew into a startup philosophy rooted in the idea that every product interaction should feel seamless, intentional, and designed with the user experience at its absolute center.

That philosophy did not stay theoretical for long — it became the DNA of a mobile design agency called Six Agency, named after apartment 6A, where the work began.

Founders building their own startup today can find a similar community of people obsessed with excellence and execution at flipitai, where the culture is built around turning creative ideas into products that actually land.

The Startup That Started as an Accident and Ended Up as a Category

One of the most important startup truths that this journey illustrates is that the most valuable companies are often born from necessity rather than strategy.

As an immigrant navigating survival in a foreign country, the initial work was whatever work was available — design jobs, freelance contracts, anything that built momentum and paid the bills.

Without a strong local network or an academic background that opened doors, the startup path began with a single friend whose introduction led to another, whose trust led to a third, and whose collective belief eventually became both a network and an investor base.

This is the startup principle that cannot be shortchanged: you cannot build anything meaningful entirely alone, and even a tiny network of deeply aligned people is worth more than a wide network of casual connections.

The mobile app that emerged from Six Agency was ahead of its time — a curated, single-product-per-day experience built before Instagram and TikTok normalized the concept of intentional discovery.

When travel experiences were added to the app’s curated catalog, engagement jumped by seventy percent almost immediately, which was the clearest possible signal that people wanted to discover and book experiences, not just products.

The friction that prevented that booking from happening inside the app — the need to leave and find the experience somewhere else — became the founding problem that every subsequent startup chapter was built around solving.

That specific insight, born from real user behavior and real engagement data, is the kind of startup validation that no amount of theoretical market research can replicate.

How a Pandemic Became the Pivot That Defined the Entire Startup

The month that the travel app was officially ready to launch was the same month the entire world shut down.

Every hotel on the planet closed its doors, travel came to a complete standstill, and a startup built entirely around the act of booking travel suddenly had no market to serve in the conventional sense.

For most people in that position, the rational response would have been to pause, retreat, or redirect entirely — but the startup mindset that had been forged through years of navigating impossible odds produced a completely different response.

Instead of contracting, the thinking expanded: when the world comes back and people remember how deeply they need to travel, what will they need, and how can this startup be ready to serve that need better than anything that existed before?

Two critical insights surfaced during that period of enforced stillness.

The first was that not a single hotel in the world could accept Apple Pay at the time — a gap so obvious and so solvable that it became the startup’s clearest entry point into the industry.

The second was that launching a consumer travel app to compete directly with massive online travel agencies was an impossible mission when those same agencies already had streamlined experiences and massive distribution.

The pivot was clean and precise: instead of competing against the platforms, Selfbook would empower the hotels themselves — giving them the payment infrastructure, the digital wallet capability, and the booking experience they needed to compete on a level playing field without surrendering twenty-five percent commission to intermediaries every time a guest booked.

The Startup Infrastructure That Changed Hotel Booking Forever

The core startup insight behind Selfbook is deceptively simple: if a guest is already on a hotel’s website and they genuinely want to book that hotel, there is no good reason for them to ever leave that website and go somewhere else to complete the transaction.

Every time a guest left to book through an OTA, the hotel paid the price — not just financially through commission, but experientially, because the booking moment had been handed to a third party who had no real investment in that particular hotel’s guest relationship.

Selfbook stepped in to provide the infrastructure that made direct booking as seamless, as trusted, and as frictionless as anything the large platforms offered — including the digital wallets that the legacy hotel systems were architecturally incapable of supporting.

The technical challenge was genuine: a modern payment solution that uses a cryptographic token does not naturally integrate with systems like Sabre, which were built in a different technological era and were never designed to accommodate the way users behave today.

Rather than attempting to replace those legacy systems — a startup assumption that proved more difficult than anticipated — the smarter path was to build an integration layer that worked with those systems and enhanced the guest experience from within them.

This is a startup lesson that applies far beyond travel: sometimes the most powerful position is not the one that disrupts and replaces, but the one that connects and elevates what already exists.

Partnering with cloud-native property management systems and building API layers that allow platforms to sell travel without rebuilding every component from scratch became the foundation of Selfbook’s scale.

The result was a startup that 3X’d its revenue in 2024, helped hotels increase website conversion by forty percent, and reduced cancellations by forty-four percent — numbers that speak with the clarity of a product that has genuinely solved a real problem.

The First Customer, the Hardest Yes, and What It Means for Every Startup

In July of 2020, with no complete product, no track record, and no existing client list, the founder flew to Pennsylvania to meet with the owner of a resort called Nemacolin during the height of a global pandemic.

The pitch was not technical and it was not data-driven at that stage — it was human, and it was honest.

It was a conversation about obsession: an obsession with giving hotel guests a better experience, an obsession with the idea that hospitality deserved better technology, and an obsession with building something that treated the guest with the same level of care that a truly great hotel already aspired to.

The owner’s response was simple and direct: if it is hospitable, we want it.

That first client is still a client today, and that relationship is a perfect illustration of a startup truth that gets lost in the noise of pitch decks and term sheets — people invest in belief before they invest in product.

The startup that wins the first customer is almost never the one with the most polished demo; it is the one whose founders are the most convincingly, undeniably committed to the problem they are solving.

For startup founders who are in that early stage right now, building their first real customer relationship from scratch, flipitai is a resource worth exploring — a platform designed specifically for creators and builders who are at the intersection of ideas and execution.

That first yes, in the hardest possible market conditions, was the proof of concept that no investor meeting could have provided.

Startup Growth, Agentic AI, and the Next Frontier of Travel Booking

The startup vision does not stop at solving today’s booking friction — it extends into the emerging world of AI-powered search and agentic discovery.

As platforms like Perplexity begin to reshape how travelers search for and evaluate hotels, the question the Selfbook startup is already answering is: what if you could search for the best hotel in a city and book it directly inside that AI interface without ever leaving the search experience?

This is not a theoretical product roadmap — it is a live direction being actively built, and it represents the next logical step for a startup that has spent years removing friction from the moment of travel intent.

The startup lesson embedded in this forward motion is one of continuous questioning: every time a new layer of user behavior emerges, the question is not whether to respond but how to be the infrastructure that makes the response possible.

The same obsession with design excellence that began in an Apple Store on Fifth Avenue is now being applied to the intersection of artificial intelligence and hospitality experience.

For founders who want to stay close to the leading edge of how startups like this think about product evolution, the flipitai community is a living resource of exactly that kind of forward-leaning, execution-focused thinking.

The Startup Mindset That Carries You Through Every Hard Season

Haruki Murakami once wrote that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional, and there is no better framing for the emotional reality of building a startup through genuine adversity.

Every founder lives inside a constant stream of trade-offs — between features, between markets, between speed and quality, between the vision and the immediate constraint — and getting those trade-offs wrong is not a sign of failure, it is a sign that you are actually building something real.

The biggest assumption that proved wrong in the Selfbook startup journey was that certain legacy hotel systems could be replaced entirely — and the wisdom that came from that mistake reshaped the entire architecture of the company’s growth strategy.

Acknowledging what you are not good at, or not positioned to do, and redirecting your energy toward what you are uniquely capable of building is one of the most underrated startup skills in existence.

Passion is not decoration — it is the engine.

When a founder’s passion is aligned with the problem they are solving, motivation does not require maintenance because it is already embedded in the work itself.

The freedom to create, regardless of background or education or the size of your starting network, is the most powerful asset any startup founder can claim — and it is available to anyone willing to refuse the option of quitting.

If you are building a startup and you are ready to stop going at it alone, flipitai is the place where that community already exists, already building, and already waiting for the next founder who refuses to give up.