What if you started a business at 23 without a traditional background in the industry—and eventually served more than 400,000 customers across 30 countries and six continents?
That is the story of Weronika Sipak, founder of Roso Travel, a global travel company that began in Gdańsk, Poland, and grew into a business offering guided experiences in more than 100 cities around the world.
But the most valuable lessons from Weronika's journey aren't really about travel.
They're about entrepreneurship.
They're about starting before you feel completely ready, turning a simple idea into a repeatable business model, building trust in unfamiliar markets, creating systems that allow a remote organization to scale, and maintaining customer experience as the business grows.
And perhaps most importantly, they're about remembering that a successful business is only one part of a successful life.
As Weronika puts it, time moves quickly. Business matters. But so do health, family, and the values that make the work worthwhile.
You Don't Have to Be an Expert Before You Start
One of the most interesting parts of Weronika's story is what she was doing before becoming a travel entrepreneur.
She was studying IT.
Travel wasn't her academic specialty. Entrepreneurship wasn't the obvious next step in her education. She didn't begin with decades of industry experience or a traditional background in tourism.
Instead, her perspective changed when she became involved with a student organization called ISEC.
Through that experience, she met people who had gone on to build major companies and hold senior positions at large corporations. More importantly, she was exposed to a different idea of what was possible.
She began to see entrepreneurship not as something reserved for people who already had all the answers, but as something she could pursue herself.
That shift in perspective eventually led her to set a personal deadline: by the fourth year of her studies, she wanted to start a company.
That is an important distinction.
She didn't wait until she had the perfect idea.
She set a deadline to begin.
Start With an Idea—and Then Test It
Weronika's advice is particularly relevant to aspiring entrepreneurs who are waiting for certainty.
You may not have the perfect business idea today.
You may not know exactly what your customers will want.
You may not have every skill required to operate the business.
You may not even feel qualified to call yourself an entrepreneur.
But those things don't necessarily have to come first.
Weronika's approach was to set a deadline, generate potential ideas, choose one, and then find out whether it actually worked.
That approach turns entrepreneurship from an abstract dream into an experiment.
Instead of asking, "What is the perfect business?"
The better question may be:
"What can I start, test, learn from, and improve?"
That mindset can be particularly powerful because businesses rarely emerge exactly as originally imagined.
The market teaches you.
Customers teach you.
Mistakes teach you.
And eventually, the business model becomes clearer.
Why Standardization Made Global Scaling Possible
Roso Travel's growth provides an excellent example of how standardization can support scalability.
The company offers guided experiences across more than 100 cities, with thousands of tours and options available to customers.
But Weronika explained that customization can make a travel business much more difficult to scale.
When every customer asks for something completely different, the company has to repeatedly reinvent the process.
Instead, Roso Travel developed a large selection of prepared experiences, with different options customers can choose from.
Customers still have flexibility, but the company doesn't have to build every experience from scratch.
That distinction is critical.
Customization can create value for the customer, but standardization creates leverage for the business.
The goal isn't necessarily to eliminate customization.
It's to determine where customization actually matters and where a well-designed standard product can provide an excellent experience without unnecessary complexity.
Build a Repeatable System Before You Try to Scale It
The lesson extends far beyond travel.
If you want to expand a business into another city, state, country, or continent, you need something that can be repeated.
Roso Travel initially expanded from one city in Poland to another. That allowed the company to learn how its model worked at a more manageable level before expanding internationally.
This is a valuable scaling principle:
Don't just build something that works. Build something that can be repeated.
A business that depends entirely on the founder's personal relationships, knowledge, and constant involvement may produce great results in one market.
But it becomes much harder to replicate.
A repeatable process changes the equation.
You can train people.
You can measure performance.
You can identify problems.
You can improve the system.
And then you can take what you've learned into another market.
Global Expansion Requires More Than Logistics
When Joe asked Weronika about the challenges of expanding internationally, he initially focused on logistics.
How do you coordinate people across different locations?
How do you manage all the moving parts?
But Weronika identified another challenge that is easy to overlook:
Trust.
When Roso Travel began expanding outside Poland, some potential guides were hesitant to work with a company based in a country that wasn't yet strongly associated with the global travel industry.
The problem wasn't necessarily the quality of the company's service.
It was uncertainty.
The guides didn't yet know whether Roso Travel could be trusted.
That created a barrier that no spreadsheet or logistics platform could solve by itself.
The company had to build credibility.
Trust Is Built Through Actions, Not Promises
Roso Travel found a practical way to reduce that uncertainty.
The company sometimes paid guides before the tour.
That gave the guides evidence that the company would honor its commitments.
Instead of simply saying, "You can trust us," the company demonstrated trustworthiness through its behavior.
Over time, those actions created a reputation.
Weronika described how the company's position changed after several years in markets such as Vienna. What had once been a company trying to convince guides to work with it became a company that guides appreciated working with.
This is a powerful lesson for any company entering a new market.
Reputation is an asset that has to be earned.
You may not be able to eliminate skepticism when you enter a new market.
But you can consistently demonstrate reliability until skepticism is replaced by confidence.
Remote Leadership Requires Clear Standards
Roso Travel operates with a remote team across Poland and India, while working with thousands of guides around the world.
That creates an enormous coordination challenge.
How do you maintain consistent quality when the people delivering your product are scattered across countries and cultures?
One answer is to establish clear standards.
Roso Travel tracks customer ratings and shares feedback with its guides. Customer satisfaction isn't simply treated as an occasional metric—it is something the company monitors consistently.
That creates a feedback loop:
The guide delivers the experience.
The customer evaluates it.
The company measures the result.
The guide receives feedback.
And the organization learns what customers value.
That is how a company can begin turning customer experience into a measurable system.
Customer Reviews Are More Than Marketing
For many businesses, customer reviews are viewed primarily as a marketing tool.
Positive reviews help attract new customers.
But Roso Travel's approach demonstrates another function.
Reviews can also be an operational tool.
If a guide consistently receives strong ratings, the company has evidence that the experience is working.
If a guide or experience receives weaker feedback, the organization has an opportunity to investigate what happened.
That turns customer feedback into something much more valuable than social proof.
It becomes a mechanism for improving the business.
For a company operating across hundreds of destinations, that feedback loop can become critical to maintaining consistency.
The Founder Became a Customer to Test the Business
One of the most practical ideas Weronika shared was her habit of experiencing the company's products from the customer's perspective.
For important destinations and best-selling tours, she sometimes joins the experience as a silent customer.
She isn't simply evaluating the tour guide.
She's evaluating the entire customer journey.
What happens if she is late?
What happens if she can't find the guide?
How quickly does the team respond?
Does the experience actually feel as good as the company believes it does?
Those details can be difficult to understand from a management dashboard.
They become much clearer when you experience the business firsthand.
This is an incredibly useful practice for entrepreneurs:
Stop occasionally being the owner and become the customer.
Experience the website.
Buy the product.
Call customer service.
Read the confirmation email.
Try to return something.
Submit a question.
Go through the onboarding process.
Look at your business through the eyes of the person paying for it.
You will often discover things your reports don't show you.
Expertise and Standardization Can Work Together
Roso Travel works with expert guides, many of whom have significant knowledge and qualifications related to the destinations they represent.
But expertise alone doesn't guarantee a consistent customer experience.
Someone can be an exceptional historian or local expert and still have different presentation or communication skills.
That's why Roso Travel uses guidelines and checklists to establish important expectations around the tour experience.
This is another important business lesson.
Systems don't have to eliminate individuality.
Instead, systems can protect the elements of the customer experience that matter most while allowing talented people to bring their own expertise and personality to the work.
That balance becomes especially important as an organization grows.
Scaling Without Losing the Customer
The biggest challenge in scaling isn't always finding more customers.
It's serving more customers without allowing quality to deteriorate.
At a small company, the founder may personally oversee nearly every customer interaction.
At a global company, that becomes impossible.
The solution is to identify what makes the customer experience valuable and turn those elements into standards, processes, measurements, and training.
Roso Travel's approach combines prepared tours, qualified guides, customer feedback, operational guidelines, and direct customer-perspective testing.
Those systems help the organization maintain consistency while operating across a large geographic footprint.
This is what scalable customer experience looks like in practice.
A 90-Person Test of the System
Weronika shared a perfect example of why operational systems matter.
A customer booked a tour for 90 people in Warsaw, in Russian, in the evening—for the following day.
That is a significant operational challenge under normal circumstances.
Roso Travel also follows a guideline of one guide for approximately every 30 people, meaning the company couldn't simply assign one guide to the entire group.
The team had to find multiple qualified Russian-speaking guides with almost no lead time.
They managed to do it.
That story illustrates something important about operational maturity.
A scalable business isn't one where unexpected problems never happen.
It's one where the organization has enough systems, people, relationships, and processes to respond when unexpected problems inevitably occur.
Working With Travel Agencies Creates Another Growth Channel
Roso Travel also works with travel agencies.
The model is relatively straightforward: agencies can incorporate Roso Travel's shorter tours and experiences into larger travel itineraries they are building for their own customers.
This illustrates another growth principle:
You don't always need to acquire the end customer directly.
Partnerships can create distribution.
A company that has already earned the trust of its own customers can become part of another company's offering.
That can create an entirely different growth channel without requiring the same level of direct customer acquisition.
For entrepreneurs, the question is worth asking:
Who already has access to the customers I want to reach?
The answer could reveal opportunities for strategic partnerships.
The Business Lesson Behind Roso Travel's Growth
Weronika's story might initially sound like a travel-industry success story.
But underneath it is a much broader entrepreneurial framework.
She started without being an industry expert.
She established a deadline for becoming an entrepreneur.
She started in one city.
She developed repeatable experiences.
She expanded into additional markets.
She encountered trust barriers.
She built credibility through consistent actions.
She developed systems for remote teams and guides.
She tracked customer feedback.
She tested her own customer experience.
And she created partnerships that expanded how customers could discover and purchase the company's experiences.
None of these individual actions is necessarily revolutionary.
The power comes from putting them together into a system.
Don't Wait Until You're Ready
Perhaps the most encouraging part of Weronika's story is that she didn't begin with certainty.
She began with a decision.
She knew she wanted to create something.
She set a deadline.
She explored possibilities.
And she learned along the way.
Entrepreneurs often believe they need confidence before taking action.
Sometimes confidence comes from taking action.
You don't have to know everything before you begin.
You need to be willing to learn what you don't know.
That distinction can be the difference between an idea that remains a conversation and an idea that becomes a business.
For entrepreneurs who are thinking about starting, growing, or systemizing their businesses, the broader lessons from this conversation are exactly the kinds of principles explored through the Glovisor community and podcast.
The Most Important Lesson Isn't About Business
Near the end of the conversation, Weronika shifted from business strategy to something much more personal.
Her message was about time.
Time moves quickly.
And entrepreneurs can become so focused on building the company that they forget to build the rest of their lives.
For Weronika, three values are particularly important: health, family, and business.
She wants to give time to all three.
That doesn't mean business isn't important.
It means business has to exist within a larger life.
An entrepreneur can build a successful company and still miss important moments with family.
They can achieve financial goals while neglecting their health.
They can spend years preparing for "someday" without realizing how quickly someday arrives.
That's why her advice is bigger than entrepreneurship.
If you want to start the business, start.
If you want to build a family, don't postpone it indefinitely.
If there is something meaningful you want to accomplish, take action while you have the opportunity.
But do it without losing sight of your values.
Build the Business—and Build the Life
Weronika Sipak's journey from a 23-year-old entrepreneur with an IT background to the founder of a global travel company serving more than 400,000 customers demonstrates what can happen when an entrepreneur combines ambition with systems.
The lesson isn't that every business should become global.
It isn't that every founder needs hundreds of employees or thousands of partners.
The lesson is that growth becomes more manageable when the business is designed to be repeatable.
Start before you know everything.
Create a product people can understand.
Standardize what can be standardized.
Build trust through actions.
Measure the customer experience.
Listen to feedback.
Test your own business.
Develop systems that allow other people to deliver value.
And when the business grows, don't forget why you're building it in the first place.
Because the ultimate measure of entrepreneurship isn't simply how many customers you serve or how many countries you enter.
It's whether the business helps you create the life you actually want.