They created a profitable business out of their passion for escape rooms. The Wroclaw startup plans to expand

17.04.2023

They were passionate about escape rooms, but had trouble finding the new and best ones. That's why they created Lock.me - a high-profile search engine that organizes them by relevant categories, filters and, most importantly, customer ratings. It provides their owners with a suite of sales and marketing tools, but also builds a community of enthusiasts. Now they have decided to expand their business.

Bartosz Idzikowski and Jakub Caban are escape room enthusiasts who formerly ran an interactive agency. However, in their spare time, they had a growing problem finding new escape rooms in Poland. This made them decide to create Lock.me – a platform that not only allows you to search for them according to your own preferences, but also brings together similar enthusiasts and enables companies to conduct effective marketing.

Escape rooms increasingly popular among companies and students

Lock.me was launched in 2015, at the very beginning of the industry in Poland. In 2022, it became Bluekey’s partner in developing a VR platform for escape rooms called Rooms of Realities. Through it, real, physical escape rooms from around the world are transferred to the virtual world. In this endeavor, the Wroclaw-based company is responsible for substantive consultation and contacts with the industry.

Lock.me's popularity is consistently growing. Last year we had a record in terms of the number of visits to escape rooms booked through our service. We noticed a very strong rebound especially after the pandemic subsided. Interestingly, there is also an increase in business clients who organize recruitment or team-building activities in escape rooms, as well as schools that conduct interactive classes for students in rooms referring, for example, to historical events.
- says Bartosz Idzikowski

Earn commission on bookings

Lock.me makes it easy to find the most suitable room for a given user. A special algorithm, based on data found on the site and collected from users, automatically shows which rooms are currently the most popular and those that are most likely to appeal to the user. The algorithm takes into account many factors, such as the experience of the players, the content of the reviews, the histogram and the time of the reviews.

“Our main source of income is commission on bookings made by Lock.me. We decided on such a model from the very beginning – we consider it the most fair. Depending on how much traffic we generate and how many reservations we confront – this is the revenue we have. In addition, we offer our reservation system as a product and periodically release board games.”
– says Jakub Caban

Polish escape rooms at European level

According to the owners of Lock.me, escape rooms are still a young industry, although in Poland such places are already at a very high international level.

“We have our representatives in the largest worldwide ranking of escape rooms called Terpeca. Currently, the highest ranked Polish room is in 7th place. An interesting trend is escaperoom tourism, i.e. going and visiting such places in other countries. Foreign players openly say that our level is really very high. And an advantage of Polish escape rooms is also that visits to them are cheaper compared to ce-ns that are on Western markets. You can also see the increasingly strong connection between escape rooms and virtual reality. VR makes it possible to superimpose additional effects, world elements on real places and thus create a completely new category of rooms.” – adds Bartosz Idzikowski