From Apple Store to $300M: The Algerian Founder Who Refused to Fail

"I don't have the option to fail, so giving up is absolutely not on the table." These weren't the words of a Silicon Valley veteran or an Ivy League MBA—they came from Khalid Meniri, who arrived in New York City from Algeria with no degree, no network, and nothing but an impossible dream.

Today, that immigrant who learned design by sneaking into the 24-hour Apple Store on Fifth Avenue has built Selfbook into a $300 million travel infrastructure company that's revolutionizing how hotels handle bookings. In 2024 alone, Selfbook tripled its revenue while helping hotels increase conversion rates by 40% and reduce cancellations by 44%.

In this raw and revealing interview, Khalid shares how he turned his outsider status into his greatest advantage, why he believes the hotel industry is "sleepwalking towards a precipice," and how being "charmingly relentless" became his secret weapon for penetrating a notoriously resistant industry.

Khalid: My name is Khalid Manieri, co-founder and CEO of Self Book. SelfBook is really providing the infrastructure for travel, so if someone is on the website and have intent to book that hotel, we should eliminate as much friction as possible to increase conversion. Before Self Book, no hotel in the world could accept Apple Pay, for instance, and so we brought in the digital wallets into the industry and then now we're adding much more features to streamline the experience even more.

Being born in Algeria, obviously geopolitically we were restricted. We couldn't travel when the pandemic was an example for a lot of people how they felt the need to travel but they couldn't. So imagine a world in Algeria where you actually can't travel because it's impossible to get a visa or especially as a young kid. So when I was able to finally leave, my moonshot was New York City and went straight to New York.

I walked up 5th Avenue and discovered the Apple store, yeah. It was beautiful I remember the first iPod ad on 5th Avenue or in Times Square that was a big iPod ad and I remember how beautiful that product was. I then learned design because they're open for 24 hours. They let you use the Mac, so that that changed my life because I was really inspired by the design and was really inspired by truly obsession of excellence and product excellence and so it made me want to learn how to design and made me a better product founder.

Khalid: My business was purely accidental. As an immigrant I had to do any job to survive. I really wanted to design products, but I had no education or network or any sort of background to earn the benefit to go and work for someone. I think not going to school here or at all and not having a stronger network when you first move in to a foreign country, you have to start somewhere and so one friend can become your network, right?

But when I was fundraising I didn't really know a lot of people, right? I knew two or three people. People, that's it. And the three of them specifically that I have in mind helped me with a build a network, fundraise. They're still my close advisers and investors and even helped me hire and get new customers. So you really can't go at this alone, right? Some will change, some will come, others will go. But whether they will end up there or not, they'll always be part of your story.

Khalid: When the iPhone launched in 2007. That sparked an idea to design an app no one had designed for mobile before, so that was a really an opportunity for a start as a starting point, and that was Six Agency. I called it Six Agency because I was working on my apartment 6A, so the name was easy to come up with.

This app in particular, an idea that we wanted to push to some of our clients to say you don't need a full catalog of products in front of a customer on a. Small device. The app would show you only one product per day. Sometimes it could be a pencil from Japan or it could be a beautiful watch. It was highly curated. This is before Instagram, before TikTok, and some of the products and experiences that we started adding is travel experiences.

When we showed these experiences, engagement went up 70%, so people really wanted to learn about an experience. or buying experience, but it was really hard to book on the app just because there was no proper booking infrastructure at the time you had to leave the app and go find the experience somewhere else in some other marketplace to book it and that's what inspired us to launch the travel app. It was an app designed where you can easily discover a hotel and book it right there and then, but the month we were officially launching it, the pandemic started.

Khalid: Every hotel in the world shut down, yet I was thinking beyond that, when the world comes back and they would want to travel again, for me. Every decision I make, I doubt, but then there is a stubborn persona in me and a relentless drive to create something seamless, and so we had to think of ways where we can pivot.

Two key insight points that I received during that time was that no hotel in the world could accept Apple Pay at the time. And secondly is that launching a consumer app is really, really hard. So for us was how can we leverage everything we built and still provide this unique customer experience to compete against OTAs was an impossible mission. Big OTAs use Apple Pay and they have a really streamlined booking experience. Some at least hotels didn't have that, so they didn't have a leveled playing field.

So Self Book provided that to. instead of them just continuing to give 25% commission to OTAs because a lack of a streamlined booking experience we were able to bring that to them. Our view was that if the guest really wants to book a hotel and they are on the hotel website, there's absolutely no reason for them to leave the website and go to an OTA to book that same hotel. They should book it right there and then. And that's where Selfbook really comes in to provide this booking infrastructure married with an end to end payment layer.

Khalid: We believe that building a guest first experience is so much better than just building another B2B product, even though it was a B2B company. When we think of the industry and we think of hotels as clients, obviously the industry is left behind from a technology perspective, and every product that they have was really antiquated. Especially on the guest experience, right? Some of these systems were built in the 60s. User behavior was moving fast, but the change was really slow.

Our rapid growth since launch was mainly driven by really being charmingly relentless. You have to push an agenda to an industry that I felt and I still feel like the worst sleepwalking towards a precipice. A modern payment solution like Apple Pay that uses a cryptogram doesn't really work. With a system like Sabre and so we had to build layers that allows a hotel that still uses Sabr to accept digital wallet and that was one of the challenges that we solved.

Khalid: But then as we kept on going we've discovered a lot of other challenges and one of them is providing flexibility in rates or even providing a single API for platforms to sell travel without having to build every single component from the ground up and as a payment company at a core or. Fintech company at the core transaction volume was key, and so we had to achieve high earlier on because we were on growth mode. So we went for hotels with higher average daily rates, or in the industry we call it ADR, so that we can achieve that higher volume. Now again we scale beyond just luxury, but that was the starting point and that's what helped us grow really fast.

Last year, 2024, we 3xed our revenue. We also helped hotels increase. Version on their websites by 40% and we also reduce cancellations by 44% so these are some of the ideas that we're working on. If you go to an agentic on AI search like Perplexity and you search a hotel, the best hotel in New York City, or I wanna stay downtown or in SoHo, what if you can book them right there and then without leaving perplexity, bringing that to life, it's so powerful. We're suited to build this and we're super excited to deliver it.

Khalid: Murakami says pain is inevitable, suffering is optional in his memoir. And it's true as a founder you're constantly debating different ideas. A key word that you know we hear every hour of the day is trade offs. You're constantly trading off different ideas and different assumptions, so sometimes you get it wrong.

Our biggest assumption was that we could replace certain systems, but that was more difficult just because hotels are set in their ways or perhaps they. Use an on-prem system that it will take decades to shift away from it and so we had to pivot our ways of thinking and work cohesively with these systems and integrate with them as opposed to completely replacing them, really focusing on what matters most and focusing on what we are good at or we are the best at.

So a perfect example, Muse, uh, they are a cloud native property management system. We're integrating with and we're really excited to work with them. We don't have to replace anything they do, but working together with them, we enhance the booking experience and so building an integration layer across the industry was key for our success and our scale.

Khalid: The first customer on Self Book is a resort called Neme Colin. This is a time where almost every hotel in the world was shut down in July of 2020. I flew to Pennsylvania. I went to this resort called Nema Colin and met with the team, met with the owner, and they were really passionate about their product. They were really passionate about hospitality despite the fact that we didn't have a full product yet and we didn't have any track record at the time or any client. They really believed in us. They believed in the vision.

It wasn't because it was technical or it would convert better or anything like that. It was because. We were obsessed about providing guests a better user experience and the owner really cared about that. She said at the time, if it is hospitable, we want it, right? And so that's what we aimed for and that was our first client and they're still our client. We're proud of that.

Khalid: Travel is a human. Connection travel is a gateway to culture and when you walk into a store, you don't see just a sheet of rates you see products and you have a conversation. So I think Self Book has big visions of its existence provide the hospitality that the industry is meant to provide anyways from day one.

Schumacher, Formula One driver, said once there is passion, motivation is there, and I feel my passion was always travel, so I was motivated to do so. I think leaving Algeria allowed me to. Continue to dream bigger having that freedom to create regardless of your background or education or lack of which in my case was really beneficial it's it's easy to give up, but you can't be a quitter you have to continue.