Jam was born last year. It only speaks French and is available via Facebook Messenger, Twitter DMs and SMS. 50.000 people have already texted Jam.
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I think it would be interesting to develop the way we handle holiday requests : For example, Jam could help a student get a train ticket to Amsterdam (and an airbnb), and once the user is at destination we could guide them through the city.
Jam should be a "background-tech" type of product, avoiding the cumbersomeness of interfaces.
The potential travel related feature you describe seems more widely applicable than just for students. Perhaps it may be better to focus on other features for the student user base first before expanding (if students are the current focus for your product). ?
About the travel assistant feature, it is indeed a feature that many could use. I have personally discovered this use-case and found it truly powerful.
This week, we have put a lot of effort into making the experience around bars as delightful as possible (put some interpolations and randomness in our wordings, put a few jokes in there, etc...).
About the business model : So far, we have tried to help companies hire talent using Jam. We signed 3 contracts in one month (25k€) but abandoned the idea eventually because we felt the product was not ready for that. Right now, we are interested in helping brands grow in the student market. Say Uber is looking for ambassadors, we can find them rapidly as our user-base is cash-poor and time-rich and there is already a high demand for student jobs. Here's a repartition of our requests received in the last 7 days (878 "student jobs") : https://infinit.io/_/BHZzvHE