Lonely Planet: Maureen & Tony Wheeler (2017)

In 1972, Maureen and Tony Wheeler bought a beat-up car and drove from London "as far east as we could go." They wound up in Australia, by way of Afghanistan, India and Thailand. Their notes on how to travel on a shoestring became a book, which grew into Lonely Planet — the largest travel guide publisher in the world. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," an update with Melanie Colón, a frustrated renter who created an easier way to communicate with noisy neighbors, called Apt App. (Original broadcast date: May 8, 2017) See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Hey, it's Guy here, and I just want to let you know that we first ran this episode last May. And we're bringing it back because we think it will totally put you in the mood for the summer travel season, especially if you happen to be going someplace very far away in a cheap car and with not a lot of money. Enjoy.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  We had grown so fast. We had television going. We had started investing heavily into the digital side of things, a lot of staff. And we were in the middle of that when 9/11 happened. And of course, people stopped traveling, and travel guides then just stopped.

• 0:37Guy Raz?

  Did you think that there was a possibility that the whole thing would collapse?

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did have to let people go. We did have to cut back the number of books we did. And I honestly believe that the whole thing could disappear.

• 0:56Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 1:07Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Tony and Maureen Wheeler backpacked along the Asia hippie trail in the '70s, jotted down some notes, and turned them into the biggest travel guide company in the world.

• 1:25Guy Raz?

  So much of how a company comes together happens by chance. I mean, think about it. If Sergey Brin and Larry Page never met, would there be Google? Same thing for Airbnb, or Instagram, or Warby Parker. They all happened because of a chance meeting, just a moment in time that could have passed. Which is kind of the story of Lonely Planet guidebooks, because it all started on a bench in Regent's Park in London on an October afternoon in 1970. Maureen Wheeler was just looking for a quiet place to sit and read.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  And as I was walking around the park, there was only one bench that had sun on it. And I walked around several times because on the bench, there was also a young man. And I thought, if I sit on that bench, he's probably going to try and pick me up. And I really don't feel like that. So I walked around a few times and I thought, damn it, this is 1970. I can sit wherever I want. So I sat on the sunny bench and turned my back to the young man and started reading my book.

• 2:24Guy Raz?

  And what were you doing, Tony?

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Oh, it's appalling now. I had a car magazine, new edition of it, and I was just reading that. When this young woman came along and sat down and started reading Tolstoy. I mean, what do you do? I said, is this the in place to read on a Thursday afternoon? And she... Did you reply positively?

• 2:48Speaker 01

  No, I turned around and looked at him and I was about to say, get lost. And then he's got nice eyes and I liked him. So I said, I don't know, I haven't been here that long.

• 2:58Guy Raz?

  They started chatting and after a while, Tony asked Maureen if she wanted to go see a movie. So they went.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  And on the way home, he got lost. And we wandered around for quite a while before I realized he was lost because Tony just sets off really confidently and keeps going, thinking he's going in the right direction. And the thing is, that's been our entire lives together.

• 3:19Guy Raz?

  Anyway, that first date led to a second and then to a third and then...

• 3:24Speaker 02

  12 months to the day later, we got married.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  And Tony's proposal was very presaic. It was May, we were in May. And he said, I will have known your year on October the 7th. And he said, we should get married. And I said, you don't get married because you've known each other for a year. And he said, no, but we would save tax.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Well, I was at a business school. That's my only excuse for that, I'm afraid. It wasn't the most romantic.

• 3:54Guy Raz?

  So, once you got married, did you think you would just sort of get jobs in London and start your lives?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  That was pretty much the plan, that I... We met just at the start of my two-year course in London and we got married halfway through that two years. But sometime in that second year together, we decided we were going to take a year off and go traveling. And that certainly changed things.

• 4:18Guy Raz?

  How did you guys make that decision? What was the conversation you had?

• 4:22Speaker 02

  I don't know. You know, it was very much a thing to do at that era. I mean, later on, they started calling it the hippie trail. And we just called it the Asia overland trip, that you left London and you headed east. But this was the era, you know, the music of the time was riding the Marrakesh Express and the Beatles were off in India. So there was a lot of sort of cultural significance to it. But we joined what became known as the hippie trail and we headed east.

• 4:51Guy Raz?

  So this is, I guess, around 1972-ish. And what was the plan? The plan was to drive from London to...

• 4:58Speaker 02

  To wherever.

• 4:59Guy Raz?

  To wherever?

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the car, we bought this car and it was so cheap that we thought, well, if it breaks down, we'll get out of it and leave it by the road. And we were going to go as far east as we could go. We had to dispose... Either it would break down or we'd sell it, one or the other.

• 5:15Guy Raz?

  So when you guys set out, you would like, you'd just start driving through Europe and then, and then what?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  You'd just keep driving. You know, you go into, you migrate to the border with Turkey and Iran, then you go right across Iran, then you go right across Turk... Afghanistan, and then you just keep going through Pakistan, and then you go through India, and then you couldn't get across, you had to fly across Burma.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  And then we'd just carry on. The plan was, we'd get to Australia, and then we would stay in Australia and work for a while. And we'd save up enough money and we'd fly back to London. And that was, that was the plan.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  See, we had so little money. We left London with £400. So that was our money.

• 5:54Guy Raz?

  And you just stayed, like, slept in the van?

• 5:57Speaker 02

  We did at times, but generally we camped most of the time across Asia until we really... Actually, even in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, you know, a lot of the hotels in those days, there'd be in gardens and you could camp in the garden.

• 6:10Guy Raz?

  At that time, how did you even know where to go and what to do and how to get the right bus? I mean, how did you figure all that stuff out?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  It's not that hard. I mean, if you walk into a bus station in Afghanistan and you're kind of pointing towards the border, somebody will put you on the right bus, you know? If you're wandering down a street with a bag and you're looking, you know, you look like you're lost, someone will point you towards a hotel or you'll see something that looks like a hotel, you know?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  You're in a restaurant, you want food.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not, it's easy.

• 6:46Guy Raz?

  Well, it's easy today because you just pull out your Lonely Planet. All right, but I'm talking about 1972, right? I mean, there was nothing really...

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, you managed. And actually, you know, what was great is that you could travel for weeks without seeing another Westerner. But then suddenly you'd pile in somewhere like Kabul or somewhere, you know, or Herat, and there'd be others. And you'd just spend maybe an afternoon just trading information, you know? When you get here, this place is good, this place isn't. You'd swap information that way. It was just like old fashioned communication.

• 7:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And what, like all along, you were keeping a journal, Tony, or both of you guys?

• 7:24Speaker 02

  I did keep a diary. I've always been reasonably assiduous about documenting things and keeping records of things.

• 7:32Guy Raz?

  What would you write down?

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Oh, just where we stayed and what it cost and how many miles the car had covered that day. And, you know, now I think about the palaces and the walls and the fortresses, you know, those things are just as important. But in those days, it was very much the information, which of course was a good thing, because that's what we were later on selling.

• 7:53Guy Raz?

  And presumably, you were doing all of this with like next to no money, right?

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. We had to do everything as cheaply as possible. So it was third class rail and it was hitchhiking. We hitchhiked from Bangkok all the way to Singapore to get down there. And then we went across by boat to Jakarta, and then we went by bus to Bali. And then in Bali, we were really run out of luck. The airline that was supposed to, that we were supposed to have tickets on to take us to Australia broke down and didn't have any more planes. And so we met this New Zealander who had a little yacht, and he was looking for a crew. To get down to Australia, so we got on his yacht and crewed to Australia.

• 8:32Guy Raz?

  Was that like scary at all?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Um, the only time I think I got really, we had a huge storm in the boat. And if I had had more sense, I'd have been terrified, but we were so busy hanging on to the boat. And then the thing, then we got to Australia and I remember standing on the yacht, looking at this coastline that had nothing on it. Nothing at all. We had come in at a place that was miles from anywhere and there was nothing. And I thought, I have no, there's snakes, there's spiders. I don't even know if kangaroos bite you. I have no idea. You know, what are we doing here?

• 9:04Guy Raz?

  What did you think you would do there? Did you think you would hang out there for a while? Did, because neither of you had any connections in Australia, right?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  No, we went to Sydney first of all. I mean, if you're going to go to Australia, Sydney is the golden city that you you all head towards. The the Yellow Brick Road leads there.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  As we're crossing the Sydney Bridge on our last ride and I said, and it was not long after Christmas, so it was quite closed holidays. And I said to Tony, how much money have we got left? And he put his hand in his pocket and he said, we've got 27 cents. And I said, well, how much is that in English money?

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Not much is the answer.

• 9:39Guy Raz?

  So what did you do? Like, how did you even?

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Well, I had a camera, so we we went to the area of Sydney where you'd dispose of those sort of things, sort of a loan shop. And we got $25 for my camera, which I bought back a week later. So we had $25 and in those days you could get a room for a week for $15. So we

• 10:01Speaker 01

  We got a single room with a single bed. The guy let us both stay there and a communal kitchen and bathroom.

• 10:06Guy Raz?

  Newlyweds, you know, it was romantic.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  At this stage, we were married almost two years.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  No, a year, a year and a bit.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  All right, it felt like two years.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Well, we've known each other for two years, yeah.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  And I got a job again. I got a job that afternoon instantly in a in a little kind of corner shop, but they did sandwiches and things. And at the end of the day, they let me take the sandwiches home that were left, so we ate. And I worked there for a little while until we, and then we both, you know, got good jobs.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  A one-year trip had now become a three-year trip.

• 10:36Guy Raz?

  So what did you, what what kind of job did you get, Tony?

• 10:39Speaker 02

  I got a marketing job for a pharmaceutical company.

• 10:42Guy Raz?

  Maureen, you're working a job, another, what was the job you were doing in Sydney?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  I was a P A in a wine company.

• 10:47Guy Raz?

  So you're working for a wine company. How do you get to a point where you're, you start selling a travel book?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Well, Tony, Tony has all the great ideas, like, let's travel around the world and let's do guidebooks. I mean, I always say Tony's the architect and I'm the carpenter. So he said, look, we should do a book of.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Really, this was after we'd met so many people. Every time we went to some sort of party or met friends at restaurants and so on, always someone would ask us, where did you go? How did you do this? There was a lot of interest in the sort of trip we did. After a while, we thought, hey, we could, instead of just telling them and writing things down, and we'll actually, you know, make, put the information down as in the form of a book and sell it.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  And I, I was working in an office, so I was able to get my typewriter and bring it home at night. And I borrowed a guillotine when we were trimming all the books and I'm one of those massive staplers, so we stapled the book together. So in a way, we kind of were able to get enough equipment to do this. We had it printed, but it was, it was a very basic little book. It was a very, it was actually done, it really was done on our kitchen table. Because actually, we only had a kitchen, kitchen and a bedroom, so.

• 11:58Guy Raz?

  And then you took it to a printer and you ran off a bunch of copies of it?

• 12:01Speaker 02

  We found a little, I mean, we didn't go to a big commercial printer. It was a guy who had this print thing in the basement under his apartment. And he printed them for us, but we just printed the pages. We actually folded them and put them together and, as Maureen says, stapled them and trimmed the edges of the guillotine. So it was really a home-produced book. You know, when they were finished and done and we had them in boxes at our apartment, I took a day off work and I went straight to the bookshop that had said they'd buy 50 copies of it and said, okay, here I am, write me the order. And, you know, at the end of the day, I'd sold a surprising number.

• 12:39Guy Raz?

  What was the price?

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Dollar eighty.

• 12:42Guy Raz?

  Dollar eighty?

• 12:43Speaker 02

  It sold for, it was 96 pages. It sold for one dollar eighty.

• 12:46Guy Raz?

  And it covered all the countries you went through?

• 12:48Speaker 02

  All of, all of Asia in 96 pages.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Very brief. But I went into, we got our big break, I suppose. I went into one bookshop and she said, and I said, do you want to buy this book? And she said, so what company are you with? And I said, Lonely Planet. She said, I've never heard of them. And I said, no, you wouldn't. And I showed her the book and she said, oh, what's your telephone number in case I want to? Get more books. Now, we didn't have a telephone.

• 13:12Guy Raz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  So I had to give her my work number. Anyway, she called me and she said, um, my flatmate is a journalist and she wants to interview you and your husband on television. So we went on television to talk about our trip and doing this book. Um, and that was our first big publicity thing, wasn't it?

• 13:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I was, um, I was reading through your first guidebook, The Pamphlet. And I mean, it's, I mean, there, there are some pretty different things in there, right? Like, I mean, like, it tells you where you can find marijuana.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  It was not hard to find it. It was all around.

• 13:41Guy Raz?

  Oh, yeah, I got it. Sorry. Or like where to get a fake ID and stuff like that, right?

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Fake IDs, fake student cards. They were very popular. They probably still are in some places.

• 13:50Guy Raz?

  I mean, I have to assume that you, you know, you guys could not have been like stoned hippies because you were pretty motivated to write every day and to go places and to catalog your business.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  No, we were actually really boring. We didn't do a lot of that stuff at all occasionally, but very rarely. In fact, it was years later, you know, as Lonely Planet became better known. All these people who were using Lonely Planet, you know, and they were really cool people, you know, it was cool people used Lonely Planet. And Tony and I would be at the cafe and all the cool people, but we just didn't look cool. And yet we were the ones who had done these books.

• 14:24Guy Raz?

  You had written the book, yeah.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  So we'd sit there quietly while they're all being incredibly cool around us and think, oh, God, this is, this is interesting, you know?

• 14:32Guy Raz?

  How did you come up with, with, with the name Lonely Planet?

• 14:36Speaker 02

  There, there is a story behind that. We, we'd got the book done, you know? We had, we had everything. We had a title for it. It was Across Asia on the Cheap. But we didn't have a title for the, the publishing house, a name for the publishing house. And we'd been out at a restaurant and drinking too much red wine. And we'd just been to see the rock and roll band on the road film, Mad Dogs and Englishmen. It was Joe Cocker and Leon Russell, traveling around the US in the late 60s. It's a great film. And one of the songs in that, that, that movie, in that, that album, is Joe Cocker singing a song called Space Captain. And the first line of the song goes, "Once while traveling across the sky, this lonely planet caught my eye."

• 15:22Speaker 02

  And I said to Maureen, I was humming the song, "Hey, that sounds nice. Why don't we call the company Lonely Planet?"

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  To which Maureen said...

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Actually, the first line is "lovely planet", and I wish you would stop singing. And he said, "Well, Lonely Planet's even better." And I said, "How?" And he said, "Well, it just sounds better." So I said, "Yeah, okay." Yeah, it's a great name. And it's a great song for us as well, you know? We're learning to live together on this planet. It was great.

• 15:52Guy Raz?

  So, did the first book, like, make any money?

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Not much.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  No, it was in some way...

• 15:58Speaker 01

  It was more or less covering the cost of the printing.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. We didn't lose money on it, but it wasn't a real money-making proposition. But around that time, when we were thinking of, "Okay, this is when we quit and head back to Europe", then we began to think, you know, "That has sold surprisingly well. Maybe we should do another book." And what we thought was, towards the end of the trip from London, we had come down through Southeast Asia. And of course, at that time, the Vietnam War was still winding down. So Southeast Asia wasn't seen as a, you know, hotspot for a holiday. It was a place next to a war zone. But we could see that was about to change. And we thought, "Okay, what we'll do is we'll travel around Southeast Asia, and we'll write the best book anybody has ever seen on Southeast Asia."

• 16:44Speaker 01

  And we had a Yamaha trail bike. That was our transport.

• 16:48Guy Raz?

  And at this point, Tony, did you think, "This is it? I think this is what we're gonna do."

• 16:53Speaker 02

  No, I still think, you know, we realized we'd sort of, we'd found a sweet spot. We found, we were doing something that people really liked. But, you know, one of the things I've said a lot over the years is it wasn't like your dot-com or, you know, social media setup these days. They start on one day, and a week later, they're worth a billion dollars. That wasn't us at all. Our business grew very slowly. And I think it was, it was more like the snowball rolling downhill. You've got to keep pushing it at first, and then it starts to develop momentum and starts to get larger as it rolls down the hill.

• 17:33Guy Raz?

  When we come back, how Tony and Maureen grew Lonely Planet and then shrank it and then almost lost it. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 18:08Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So in 1973, Tony and Maureen were traveling around Southeast Asia once again. And they were doing research for their second Lonely Planet book.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Well, it was just about finished and I had a dummy of the book. There was one big bookshop in Singapore. I got an appointment with a buyer for that bookshop. And I thought to myself, you know, he'll definitely, he'll certainly buy 10 copies. And if I'm lucky, he'll buy 20 or 50. He listened to my spiel and then I looked at my dummy of the book. I saw him writing Southeast Asia on a shoestring on the order form and then write some number down. And he spun the order around and pushed it across the desk to me. And he bought 1,000 copies.

• 18:54Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  I walked out of that office, you know, a foot above the ground and raced back to the hotel and said to Maureen, "We've sold 20% of our print run to one bookshop. Fantastic."

• 19:07Guy Raz?

  So after you saw the success of that book, what, I mean, what was your next move?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  And we did another one.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Another one, another one. People started coming to us with ideas for other books.

• 19:18Guy Raz?

  And Maureen, did you think, I mean, so by the mid 70s or late 70s even, did you still, did you think that this was going to be your work? I mean, did you, did you both kind of focus full time on this thing now?

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Pretty much, although I was at university. That, you know, I had plenty of time left to work on Lonely Planet and to travel.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  The first year, though, of Lonely Planet in Melbourne, you had a full-time job. And, you know, we were living on your Maureen's salary while I worked on the books.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  I didn't think it was going to be our life. I couldn't see how it could. It was still Tony and I, living in a little rented house with a pile of boxes, boxes everywhere full of books. And when we, you know, we'd wrap them, we'd dress them, we'd put them in the back of the car and take them to the post office. I mean, you don't really see a multinational conglomerate growing out of this. You know, I was still going down to the docks to pick the books up when they came in from the printer and then sending them out again, you know. It still felt very much like a cottage industry, you know.

• 20:20Guy Raz?

  And it wasn't like you went out and raised any money, you were just...

• 20:23Speaker 01

  No, nobody would give us any money.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically, you know, if you told a bank, you know, what we were doing books on, they'd say, get a life. It wasn't...

• 20:31Speaker 01

  No, we didn't have any money and we weren't making a lot of money, but we were making enough to keep on doing books.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  But we did find other people were coming to us, you know, they'd used our book and they'd say, you know, I really liked your book, Travelling Around South East Asia. I'd been living in South America, you know, I could write a book about this place or that place. So we started getting other people coming to us with similar ideas. And really, by the end of the seventies, we had about twenty books.

• 20:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah. What was the turning point? What was the book that, like, all of a sudden where you thought, okay, this is our breakthrough?

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Well, it was very easy to see that one. We did a book on India and we researched that in nineteen eighty. This was the first time we'd been able to, you know, put a team into a place. So Maureen and I were one team and we had two other writers and we sort of divided the country up, the north, the south, the middle.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  And I found out I was pregnant just about a week before I flew to India for this five-month trek around India.

• 21:27Guy Raz?

  Wow, so you're pregnant, travelling around India, and were you guys just like stuffing pamphlets and brochures and notes in your backpacks?

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, very much so.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  There wasn't anything else. I mean, we'd also collect every brochure, every timetable, every map. I mean, we'd go with hardly anything in our rucksacks and come back with this massive pile of information.

• 21:48Guy Raz?

  Of stuff, yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, much easier these days. We put it on a memory stick. And suddenly we had this book that was over seven hundred pages and it sold for, you know, double figures. It was twelve dollars or fourteen dollars or something instead of three or four. And it just sold. It sold. We sold a hundred thousand copies of it.

• 22:07Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  It was the first all India book of that kind, you know, guide that told you everything. And there wasn't, it wasn't a book like that, but there was all of that huge interest in India at the time, you know, so it it just took right off.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  The company doubled its size overnight and we suddenly started taking on more writers and looking at other big projects.

• 22:28Guy Raz?

  And and you had a baby at this point?

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:32Guy Raz?

  So what did you do? I mean, how did you sort of?

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Well, we took her with us, you know, we, when she was, how old was she when you went to India, that got to India to Malaysia?

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Southeast Asia. She was eight months.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Eight months, yeah. So we dragged our eight-month-old daughter around with us.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  And we have two children and every school holiday, we'd we'd just go Africa or Asia or wherever. And they'd travel with us for that period of time. So every time we got a chance, we'd go and travel as a family. But mainly Tony was doing the writing and the sort of the planning and all of that. And I was doing the carpentry, you know, keeping it together.

• 23:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  And we'd actually moved out of the house.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  We had a real office.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  We'd moved into a kind of ramshackle office and we had a lot of kind of loose contractors. You know, they'd float in and out and do a bit and float out again and we paid them by the hour sort of thing. So it was beginning to take shape in the eighties as a real business.

• 23:25Guy Raz?

  When, at what point did you stop having sleepless nights about whether you were going to be sustainable?

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Well, I know, we've had sleepless nights all every year. I would say actually towards late eighties, early nineties, I think was more when it became obvious that this thing had its own momentum and it was carrying us as much as we were pushing it.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  And I've talked to people who are doing the, handling the publishing at LP at that time, and they said it just seemed like we couldn't do anything wrong, that every book we did, you know, sold and I, I think when we started doing Europe Guides, because we, we were this little publisher at the other end of the world who'd started off doing Asia, and when we finally did get around to doing Europe, we were big enough by that point that we could really do it well. And I think people in the office really got a kick out of that, that it was such a thrill doing that and sort of, you know, going out and taking on anybody in the world who wanted to try and compete with us.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  I mean, people everywhere you went were using Lonely Planet Guides. I mean, it used to give me a thrill, you know, even in New York, seeing someone come in with a German copy, Chinese copy, or, you know, whatever, just, I used to love that.

• 24:34Guy Raz?

  But, I mean, were there ever any moments where, you know, it wasn't going well?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Oh, there was a period when things were not looking very good. And that happened at around, around 2000, and we had grown so fast, and we reached a point where we were doing so much. We had television going, we had started investing heavily into the digital side of things, a lot of staff, a lot of, you know, we created a whole lot of desktop publishing before it was even a term. And it was eating away all of the money. The books were still selling like crazy, but we were just doing so much. And we were in the middle of that when nine eleven happened, and of course, people stopped travelling, and travel guides then just stopped.

• 25:15Guy Raz?

  Did you think that there was a possibility that the whole thing would collapse?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely did.

• 25:21Guy Raz?

  Really?

• 25:21Speaker 02

  I didn't.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Tony, Tony's an incurable optimist. I mean, and that's one of his charms, but it's also one of the most infuriating things, because we were definitely looking at a really bad time. We were looking at, we did have to let people go. We did have to cut back on our offices overseas. We did have to cut back the number of books we did. And it was looking, I honestly did believe that it was possible the whole thing could just disappear. Wow.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  I've got to say, in retrospect, I think Maureen's view of it was much more accurate than mine.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  So we really had to pull, start pulling everything together in a very serious way.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  But we did, I mean, we did cut back and make it a much more efficient business. So it did turn around. It took a couple of years, but it did turn around.

• 26:01Guy Raz?

  But I guess it was around, around that time, I guess, the mid 2000s, where you, you wound up selling the company, right?

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think we both felt that it wasn't the same company anymore. It was, it was turning into much more of a digital company. And that has a way of taking over everything. It's not something I'm particularly excited about.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  We, we really felt it was time. It wasn't going to be a dynasty. We weren't going to hand it on to our kids. Our kids had both worked in the company at one stage, but neither of them were going to take it over from us. And, and we just began to feel it was time to move on to something else.

• 26:36Guy Raz?

  And, I mean, did you, did it feel great to sell it? Did it feel sad?

• 26:42Speaker 01

  It was the saddest day of my life.

• 26:43Guy Raz?

  Really?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  One of the saddest days of my life. It was, I remember walking to the BBC with Tony to sign the, the final papers.

• 26:51Guy Raz?

  BBC, who, who bought it, of course.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I said to Tony, do you have your passport? And he said, no. I said, no. I said, you know, if you had a passport, I'd just go straight up to Heathrow and get out of here.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  We could still escape, yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  I think I drove the sale of Lonely Planet more than Tony did. And I always wondered, you know, if afterwards he would really regret that.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  I haven't.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  I know, he hasn't. But I did worry and was a huge amount of grief about it. It took months for me to, I, I still find it very hard to go back to the office. And, you know, I just, it's just hard.

• 27:28Guy Raz?

  I mean, from, from somebody listening to this, like an outsider's perspective, and I know you've probably heard this from people who've said, you've just lived the dream. I mean, you got to travel around the world and create a company. And yeah, you sold it and it's not yours anymore, but it made you rich and look at your life.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Oh, God. Listen, I think like that every day.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  And we do, every year we do trips together and we do trips with friends. And then every year I, I go places on my own, you know, that I know Maureen would not want to go to.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Chernobyl.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Chernobyl.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  I wanted to check the radiation, how it was these days.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  I go to see Ring Cycles and operas.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  And I can go to opera, but there is a limit to my consumption of opera.

• 28:14Guy Raz?

  You know, I am curious, because I interviewed John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, for this show, and he was talking about an early relationship he had with the woman that helped him start Whole Foods, and how it really destroyed their relationship. It broke down over it. And he says, you know, business can really bring people together, or it can just tear them apart.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  It can do both.

• 28:38Guy Raz?

  I mean, you guys are approaching 50 years of marriage, and it just sounds like you have an incredible partnership. And, I mean, were there times, were there times when you were building up this company where there was tension and there was, you know, there was crisis, or there would, you know, there was...

• 28:53Speaker 02

  There was all of that, all of it and a lot more. You know, we, you know, we've had our fights, we've had our squabbles. It hasn't always been plain sailing.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  And, you know, you cannot, you cannot run a business where you bring personal stuff into the office. I mean, you can't avoid it to some extent. And it was funny, you know, at Lonely Planet, people always knew, first of all, you come and talk to me about an idea, and I'll tell you whether it's worth. Tony has what's called the five-second, you've got a five-second window to engage his attention. You know, it's like the lifespan of a mosquito or something. So they would come to me and say, Maureen, I think this is great. What do you think? And I'd say, I think it's good. And they'd say, shall I tell Tony? And I'll say, yeah, let me talk to him first.

• 29:39Guy Raz?

  How much of your, of your success and what happened with this company and everything, how much do you think is due to luck, and how much because you're just really smart and skilled?

• 29:50Speaker 02

  You definitely need both. And there's that saying about, you know, whenever I'm working really hard, I seem to be luckier. But, you know, we were lucky. We came along when the baby boomers were suddenly deciding they needed to go to more interesting places than their parents did. So there was that element. They were a big market. Well, that was important. There were all sorts of things that it was a very lucky time to be there.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  I don't know that skill came into it with Tony and I. There was judgment, I suppose, and... And the fact that we were doing something that we knew everything about.

• 30:23Guy Raz?

  But it's clear that this company could not have become what it became without the both of you. I mean, you both brought different skill sets to this. And amazingly, this chance meeting on a bench in Regent's Park resulted in this incredible company. What were the traits that both of you had, like, that you brought to the company?

• 30:43Speaker 02

  More in sense and meme nonsense.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Tony, Lonely Planet would never have existed without Tony. He was a dreamer, a vision, but he also very keenly knew how he was going to place Lonely Planet very early on. And he never ran out of that kind of mad enthusiasm, which carries you through so many things. However, he was not good at day-to-day stuff. He never wanted to sit through meetings. He never wanted to sit with bankers. He liked all his staff, but, you know, he didn't want to hear what their problems were, basically.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  I was terrible, I must admit.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  It wasn't terrible. That wasn't terrible. It was just really, he just wanted to know what new book we were going to do, and, you know, how big was it going to be, and where the maps and pictures. I mean, the books that we did were fabulous books. If you look at our covers and inside, they just got better and better looking, which was good. And a lot of that was Tony. You know, Tony would look at a book and say, you know, this needs this, you know, this is what we need to do with this. So I would say that, I guess I've always said that Lonely Planet could never have existed without Tony, but it probably wouldn't have held together as long without me.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  I'd agree with that.

• 31:57Guy Raz?

  Tony and Maureen Wheeler, founders of Lonely Planet. By the way, at its height, the company was valued at a quarter of a billion dollars. The Wheelers are no longer formally involved with the company. They sold all their shares. But Tony did recently score a gig writing a chapter for a new Lonely Planet book. It's called Epic Drives of the World. And as I speak, Tony is on a three-and-a-half-month drive from Bangkok to London in a classic British MG sports car. And one last question for you. When you travel, like, what is a thing you have to have in your carry-on bag?

• 32:32Speaker 02

  My passport and a credit card.

• 32:34Guy Raz?

  That's boring. Come on.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Now, for me, I've got this wonderful pair of cashmere slippers.

• 32:39Guy Raz?

  Oh, nice.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  They are so cozy and comfortable on. When I get on a plane and I put them on, then I kind of can relax.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  I've never seen those.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Yes, you have. You just never noticed.

• 32:57Guy Raz?

  And please do stick around because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you're building.

• 33:04Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for How You Built That. And today, we're going to update a story we ran last year, one that you can probably relate to if you happen to live in an apartment building and share a wall with your neighbor, which is exactly what happened to Melanie Cologne.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  I was sleeping and all of a sudden I heard this huge pounding and booming on the other side of the wall. And what was going on is my neighbor was watching some sort of thriller movie and the bass was literally shaking my bed.

• 33:40Guy Raz?

  Oh, I have been there, Melanie. Anyway, as you might imagine, Melanie first tried to talk directly to them.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  One time, I went to my neighbor's door. I knew they were in there. I could hear them talking, but they wouldn't answer their door.

• 33:53Guy Raz?

  Melanie and her husband, Luis, tried everything.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  You know, the creative note leaving or hitting the ceiling with a broom or stomping your foot on the ground.

• 34:01Guy Raz?

  And none of it was working for them.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  So we looked around for a solution. We asked our friends in the apartment industry, is there anything that we can use to help us with this? And there was absolutely nothing. And so we thought of the neighbor-to-neighbor notification tool, where neighbors can notify each other completely anonymously and confidentially about a disturbance from their neighbor.

• 34:21Guy Raz?

  And so finally, Melanie and Luis hired a team to start developing an app, which they named AptApp, as in apartment app. And here's how it works. The property management agrees to use the app, sends over the blueprint of the building. And then when neighbors have issues, they can log onto their app and anonymously contact the actual unit they're having an issue with.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  So let's say Joe has a neighbor that is playing their music too loud upstairs. He can select that square, choose a preset notification. So this one would be fitting for a please turn down your music. So he can select that and then send it to the neighbor upstairs. And then that neighbor is able to respond with resolved or sorry, not me.

• 35:05Guy Raz?

  The property manager can also see if the neighbor has responded or if an intervention is required. Melanie and Luis beta tested it in a big apartment complex in Missoula, Montana with 100 units.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  It went really well. Everyone was really excited about all the tools that were available and how easy it made communication with staff and residents.

• 35:25Guy Raz?

  Since we last spoke with Melanie, she and Luis have started working with apartment buildings in the Denver area, where they hope to sign up about 75 of them by the end of this year. And they also want to branch into a new market, university housing. And by the way, Melanie quit her job as a nurse around the end of 2016 and is now working full time on AptApp.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  There's definitely been times where we thought, how easy would it be to go back to our day jobs? But at the same time, we can't even stand the thought of it, and we get right back to work.

• 35:59Guy Raz?

  If you want to learn more about AptApp or hear previous episodes, head to our new podcast page, howibuiltthis.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. We love hearing from you. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at [email protected]. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at how I built this. Our show was produced this week by Rachel Faulkner, with original music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Noor Kudsi, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Niva Grant,

• 36:42Guy Raz?

  and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is J.C. Howard. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  The news moves fast. Listen to the NPR News Now podcast to keep up. We update stories as they evolve every hour. So no matter when you listen, you get the news as close to live as possible on your schedule. Subscribe to or follow the NPR News Now podcast.