Indie Campers: Building Tech and Product from Zero at Portugal's Fastest-Growing Company

In short: I joined Indie Campers in May 2018 as Director of Product & Technology, when the company was doubling every year and running on tools it had outgrown. Over two and a half years I built an in-house tech and product team from zero to 30 people and a fully digital platform. Over that time the fleet grew from 650 vans in 10 countries to more than 1,200 in 15. When COVID-19 hit, that platform let the company switch to contactless rentals and launch two new business models in the same year.


Company	Indie Campers, a Lisbon campervan rental company
My role	Director of Product & Technology
Team	Built in-house tech and product from 0 to 30 people
Scale	650 vans in 10 countries (end of 2018) → 1,200+ vans, 40 locations, 15 countries (2020)
Recognition	Fastest-growing company in Portugal in the FT1000 2020 ranking

What was Indie Campers?

Indie Campers rents campervans for road trips across Europe. Hugo Oliveira founded it in Lisbon in 2013 with three vans. It grew without outside investors, funded by its own revenue. In 2018 its turnover doubled and the number of trips more than doubled, from about 3,000 to almost 6,500. Ninety percent of customers came from abroad.

What was the challenge?

Fast growth exposed everything. Every new country meant new depots, new languages, new pricing, and more vans to move, clean, check and hand over. The company had no in-house technology team; the website and the operational tools had been built to run a smaller business.

The challenge had two parts:

Build a team that could own technology and product for the long term, inside a company that had never had one.
Build a platform that let the business keep doubling without doubling the people needed to run it.

What did I do?

1. Built the team from zero. I hired and structured an in-house team of 30 across engineering, product, design and data, in Lisbon. We worked as a senior, agile product team and owned the full stack, from the customer website to the back-office tools used in every depot.

2. Rebuilt the customer website for international growth. In 2019 we moved the public site to a modern Vue/Nuxt front end with a headless CMS (Prismic). Marketing teams in each country could publish content without engineers, and every page was built for search and speed. Customer acquisition was 100% online, so the website was the sales channel.

3. Made the whole customer journey digital. Booking, payment, online check-in (opening 30 days before pick-up, with document upload and add-ons), vehicle tutorial videos and tablet verification at the depot. Fewer manual steps meant faster handovers and fewer errors at every location, in 10 languages.

4. Introduced fully dynamic pricing. With a fleet spread across 15 countries and very seasonal demand, fixed price lists left money on the table. Prices that responded to demand, season and availability let each van earn more.

5. Built one operations platform for every country. Depots, fleet, bookings and customer support ran on a single in-house platform on AWS, with infrastructure as code. Opening a new country became a configuration and operations task, not a software project.

6. Turned the platform into new business models during COVID-19. When travel stopped in 2020, the digital journey allowed contactless pick-up with almost no changes. We then opened the platform to other owners: a campervan rental marketplace (announced August 2020, with about 2,000 owners pre-registered within weeks) and monthly and annual subscriptions for remote workers (October 2020).

What were the results?

Scale without proportional headcount. The fleet went from 650 vans in 10 countries at the end of 2018 to more than 1,200 vans across 40 locations in 15 countries in 2020, all on one platform.
A fully digital business. 100% online acquisition, online check-in, dynamic pricing and support in 10 languages.
Growth recognised. Indie Campers was the fastest-growing company in Portugal in the Financial Times FT1000 2020 ranking, with 2,878% revenue growth from 2015 to 2018.
Resilience in 2020. Flexible cancellations and contactless pick-up kept customers booking. UK domestic bookings grew about 200% year on year in summer 2020, and the marketplace and subscriptions opened two new sources of revenue.

What did I learn?

Build the team before the platform. In a company that has never had in-house technology, the first hires define what "good" looks like for years. I spent my first months on people and ways of working, not code.

In travel, operations is the product. Customers judge the trip by the handover at the depot as much as by the website. The biggest wins came from digitising the physical journey, not from new features.

A real platform turns a crisis into options. Because the business already ran on its own digital platform, COVID-19 became a reason to launch new products, not only to cut costs.

Scaling a fast-growing company that has outgrown its tools? Work with me.