My experience participating to a startup weekend competition in Italy
danielpetrica.com
danielpetrica.com
In this case, OP is working on something in the travel space which is notoriously a startup tarpit because customer acquisition costs end up killing most ideas.
You can’t meaningfully affect frequency of usage via your actions and the vast majority of the audience travels infrequently enough that they forget your tool exists the next time they travel.
Also, if you’re serving outbound, you need to bizdev a meaningful amount of the globe to first gain utility. If you’re serving inbound, the customer acquisition generally only happens late in the user journey and is expensive/time consuming to access.
There are still successes in the travel space but the odds are stacked against you.
We're aware that the small validation we were able to do during the weekeend so now we are trying to validate it really by organising a real trip in September.
We are trying to bootstrap it at the moment and count on our network of friends, Clients (the main founder is a personal trainer) and people that expressed interest initially. we count on organizing the first 2-3 trips to be understand if the idea makes sense to continue or not. we also aim to understand the difficulties with this 2 initial trips to perfect the formula for the trip and find difficulties.
We are not building a tool, but are trying to organize group trips to sell to clients.
We are aware of the high cost of user acquisition too so we have a marketing person in the team. And we aim to try building a community long term with old trip participants and interested people.
We also want to give a healthy/fitness spin to the trip so people will be able to attend the gym or do athletic activities (not my knowledge domain, I bring the outside view to the team by not being in the fitness niche).
You might as well be saying "we are trying to make movies to sell tickets".
Organising group tours as such is easy, but the value is in the creative input that engages and inspires possible clients. Destination, people - both guides and participants, activities, materials are all part of this. It can't be "tested" just as two movies with the same synopsis can be completely different.
> Organising group tours as such is easy, but the value is in the creative input that engages and inspires possible clients. Destination, people - both guides and participants, activities, materials are all part of this. It can't be "tested" just as two movies with the same synopsis can be completely different.
Thank you for this input. I agree with you that the experience is the most important part. We are preparing the first trip and will try to keep this in mind too. We want people to go back home at the end with great memories and having met new friends. We know we can't guarantee this to all but we'll try to insert activities and occasions to create community (probably not the best term to describe it). The biggest success for us will be if people go back home with 7/8 new friends.
Like imagine if I add to your pitch "trips for people that like ... And to have a bottle of ketchup on lunch tables and that like hotels name starting with b or k".
Probably ok for a small modest local travel agency but not more.
I would see more success as a "sport and leisure group trips travel" agency but I guess that there are few other competitors in the field.
There's a very basic funnel you can define and the validation is inserting numbers into the funnel to figure out where (if anywhere), the business is. The artistry is figuring out where the rules are and where you can break the rules in surprising ways to make the funnel work.
eg: You can do customer validation on your users and ask them the following Qs:
* Have you ever gone on a group tour with strangers before, how many times? Under what circumstances?
* Show me your calendar for the last 3 months, black out all the dates you definitely couldn't have been open to a tour, what are the dates that remain as a percentage?
* How much have you spent on travel over the last 12 months? What percentage of that was the destination non-negotiable (ie: visiting parents) vs negotiable on a shortlist vs totally open to suggestion?
* How many tools that you used only once 3/6/12 months ago can you name right now? How many under the right prompting? How many did you totally forget unless you got the "oh yeah, I did use that thing a while back".
Start with the end result of how many people before a trip breaks even and work backwards to understand how many people need to fill a cohort before you can reach that breakeven number. Many people who are in your theoretical target market just can't do any trip for totally understandable reasons and you have to be realistic about the cohort you need to reach per trip at scale.
The art is figuring out which sub groups the numbers get weird in your benefit. eg: Parents with young children will always cluster their travel around the school calendar so you get a particular density you can build on but this is also not a group classically associated with fitness. Retirees have a more flexible schedule but also not associated with fitness. Are there other cohorts this might be viable with? I have no idea, it's your job to find out!
But rather than taking 3/6/12/120 months to figure out the answer, there's Qs you can ask that disvalidate your hypothesis in the first month! Figure out what those Qs are and ask those!
PS: I work as a founder coach, feel free to msg me from my bio if you're interested in talking more. Always happy to chat for free for motivated founders.
Scientist: Damn it, now I'm out 20 dollars!
This is a bog standard travel package. So many of these exist and they are not difficult to produce.
Selling them (really) successfully usually revolves around some pre-existing brand tied to celebrities, authors, books that connect with the destination or theme.
I'll update the article once we defined the program better. We have a marketing expert to take care about the promotion and positioning, that is not my area of expertise. I'll forward the advice to him. thank you, if you have any other advice please feel free to comment. Any piece of feedback can be very useful in this step.
In my view, entrepreneurs spend way too little time on the problem space and rather jump into the solution space very quickly (way too quickly).
The world is full of problems people accept to live with that they just don't consider important enough to solve.
That's the essence of Paul Graham's 'build what people want, not what people need' which is the founder of YC.
People will tell you whatever they think you want to hear. When interviewing them you need to understand how they solved the problem before and the actions they took to solve it. Actions speak much louder than words and you can understand how they think about solving the problem which picks up valuable contextual information as well as potential alternative solutions (competing solutions) they evaluated.
Once you understand the full context and why they do what they do, you can identify the core problem and related "jobs-to-be-done" which really helps in setting product and marketing strategy as well as positioning towards others.
You can do all this with spending very little money to be honest, you may have to put money as an incentive to get enough people to talk to.
And then last, if I were you I would find AI use-cases in mid-size companies (20-200 employees). About 80% of early-stage investor money is flowing into AI right now.
> People will tell you whatever they think you want to hear. When interviewing them you need to understand how they solved the problem before and the actions they took to solve it. Actions speak much louder than words and you can understand how they think about solving the problem which picks up valuable contextual information as well as potential alternative solutions (competing solutions) they evaluated.
We tried to apply some of that in the limited time we had — for instance, we avoided presenting the idea directly and focused on questions that revealed whether people had faced similar problems before.
> And then last, if I were you I would find AI use-cases in mid-size companies (20-200 employees). About 80% of early-stage investor money is flowing into AI right now. We're not actively seeking investment at the moment, but your point about AI in mid-size companies is very relevant — it's something we’ll keep in mind as we evolve.
There is just something magical about working on something fun and pulling an all nighter.
The area where I live doesn't have an active tech community but it's starting to improve thanks to some communities meetups and similar events and the main attraction of this events is the ability to meet friends in tech or interesting fields like marketing.
I didn't have the energy to pull a all nighter so I went back home at 1 am, but some members did exactly that to finish the pitch for sunday.
Personally, I’m very introverted, especially around people I don’t know. But talking to those in the same field or about shared interests feels different. Even though I’m shy and introverted, I was still able to have long conversations about these topics.
Yeah this is just wrong.
You’ll hear it all the time everywhere but it’s still wrong.
Your startup does not NEED to solve a problem.
Unless of course you want to play word games and twist everything in life in terms of it being a problem.
A lot of startups offer the solution to problems that people don't actually have... And then (through marketing) make people feel the problem.
It might seem counter-intuitive as it would narrow the market, but at the same time will provide more value for the potential audience. It will help focus marketing budget also. Like maybe target professional athletes or Pilates fans as an example.
Good luck!