Ask HN: What do you think of my startup idea?

Doesn't something like this exist? AKA Tour Guides?

Also, I think in order to cut down costs for the people who use this service, it'd have to be a group thing. Having a private session by a personal tour guide will be very expensive and extremely niche (ie: the wealthier people) and that, I think, will be your biggest challenge.

I think another approach (which is also on my list of random ideas) is instead of having a personal tour guide, have a person that functions similar to a info kiosk instead.

Example: Say you're a Canadian visiting Malaysia, and the 'host' will be someone that's informed in both Canadian and Malaysian culture and paper work/law. They're the go to person for everything, questions you have, whether it's visa, places to stay/visit/eat at. If you ever run into problems, they can advice the best course of action, etc. Naturally, they'd be well versed in both languages (yours and the country you're visiting). They'll be a number you call if you ever need anything, need a price check, need a cab, etc.

(Regardless, the biggest issue is safety and insurance for a random person selling 'adventures, which you have already identified. Definitely throw a Craiglist up, sell a local adventure that you're confident in taking people on and see how that goes and decide from there. Good luck!)

"Doesn't something like this exist? AKA Tour Guides?"

Yep: http://www.vayable.com (we're even in YC this summer)

We have a wide range of things to do, all over the world, and most aren't expensive at all. One of the most exciting things about what we're doing is that we're building up a large community of people who have really intimate knowledge of cities all over the world, and helping them make a living.

In your example, if you need to find places to stay/visit/eat in Malaysia, looks like we've already got you covered:

http://www.vayable.com/experiences/search/malaysia/by/popula...

http://www.vayable.com/

The startups aren't exact matches of what you want to offer, but they haven't been mentioned yet and they might offer some inspiration.

Excursionist (http://excursionist.com) - Create and book unique, one-of-a-kind travel experiences. Definitely targeted at a higher end consumer. Worth watching for the way they editorialize places.

SideTour (http://sidetour.com) - Hosts create unique experiences. Users then buy those experiences. Looks like hosts write the copy for each experience, which (if that is in fact the truth) saves a lot of time on copywriting. Once you have the infrastructure you could theoretically scale across the world.

Overall I like the idea, but as a consumer I have a few thoughts.

1. I think it's going to be really important to separate yourself from the existing competition. Otherwise I probably won't sign up for yet another newsletter when I really only take a one or two trips a year. 2. The vetting/quality control process will be extremely important. If I'm going to climb Everest with someone, I really want to make sure the experience in their profile is in fact true. 3. Finesse re: selling me at the right time will go a long way. I don't know if this means you hit me when I'm actually booking a trip or what, but unless the way you present this experiences is incredibly entertaining/awe inspiring, this context factor could very easily make the difference between pestering the consumer and offering a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I don't think UrbanDaddy Jetset or Gilt's Jetsetter has this quite figured out. Though I'm sure they still make money, figuring out a way to present yourself more effectively could go a long way.

Whatever the case, I still think there's room for innovation in the space.

Thanks for the startups list. It's good to get a feeling for the market, even startups not quite in the exact space.

What I would like to see (maybe a bit more complicated, but I would love it):

* Select day, say next Sunday.

* Select time, say 11am-4pm

* Select location, say Sydney CBD

* Select type of activity, say both sightseeing and food, or anything.

* Enter amount of money, say $200 for two adults.

* Click 'search' and then browse the things I could do there at this time spending that much money.

For example: harbour cruise, or cruise and a lunch in a near-by restaurant, or bowling and pizza in a near-by cafe, etc... Also with comments for these activities, links to venue's websites, easy to print-out maps, etc...

AirBnB has it a bit easier, because they let normal people rent out their own space (which involving tidying up a bit and locking away the valuables, basically), and normal people are qualified to do that, more or less.

The folks who are qualified to run adventures probably do exactly that, professionally, and so are already listed in the yellow pages, have their fliers in the local tourist offices, may be listed (and reviewed) on the Lonely Planet site, etc..

Though, if you're focusing on a wealthy clientele, you could well have professionals listed offering experiences that they only do rarely, and aren't available otherwise.

Alternatively, you might be able to aim for mini or offbeat adventures as well, likewise only rarely available. "Get a tour of Chicago's graffiti from a famous (reformed) graffiti artist". "Tour of a (private) organic farm and lunch with the owners; offered 4x a year." "Letter-press tour and workshop in an active shop" -- etc.. I have a friend in central France, a professional baker with a massive wood-fired bread oven who tried giving daylong workshops on making organic bread a few times a year; it was pretty tricky to organize something so irregular, though, as she couldn't do it unless it was fully booked (if there were only a couple of people whose schedules lined up with a date, she would need to cancel it). There's a pain point that'd be nice to fix.

HTH.

Love it. Here's some further thought. Some expeditions are only possible given a certain size and budget. Make it like kickstarter where a guide can propose an expedition but that expedition will only go if it gets enough interest and funding.

"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success."

Love it. Kickstarter for adventures. It wouldn't even need to be big expeditions (although they would be awesome), it could simply be that for a canyoning guide to justify spending a day taking people through a canyon, they'd need at least x amount of paying clients. It could deal with the payments, booking etc... and let the guide deal with what they do best - the adventure.

Couldn't this just be done on Kickstarter currently? Just make the rewards different levels of inclusion on the adventure. Although I don't know if Kickstarter has a way to cap donations, you wouldn't want to have to bring 1000 people with you.

Sure it could, but even in your comment, you're already adding layers of hacks onto kickstarter to force it into workability.

Sounds like a perfect candidate for its own platform.

You can limit rewards if you like (usually used for "early bird" discounts). However, I doubt Kickstarter would approve, as it's supposed to be for creative projects only.

Here's an advice I've learned by experience. Indeed, many of us have a hundred ideas before the morning shower, and we often start working on some of them. But to have any chance of success, what you really need is a domain expert.

This means that, in this particular example, you need someone who has experience at least with tourism in general, and ideally with adventure tourism and similar activities in specific. Also, they need to be able to think out of the box and explore new possibilities in their trade.

Ideally, this means that you're working in an area YOU know intimately yourself, or barring that to have an expert for a co-founder. If you don't, you'll have to learn the basics and make the rookie mistakes which an expert would avoid.

When you look around, you'll notice that there are very few success stories that were started without an expert in the field. Off the top of my head I can think only of AirBnB, and they keep running into basic level situations like trashed apartment and the like.

Good advice. Although I am not a full time guide, I have a lot of domain experience and have guided in the past. I have intimate knowledge of the adventure/guiding community and what's involved with adventures, but need to research more about guiding companies and legals involved with that. I think partnering with someone who has run an adventure guiding company would be ideal.

To get your idea off the ground, you might consider partnering with tour operators (aka tour guides) that maintain expertise in their individual adventures. That way, at the beginning, you leave the "guiding" up to the experts while you work to measure demand, create a brand and iterate on the value proposition. By handing off the actual "guiding", you can focus on developing the business. Also, I think this method demands less startup capital and/or licenses. While vayable.com does this for small (relative to your past trips) experiences, perhaps a market exists for the grand adventures? Your expertise would be useful in identifying exactly what people want/need when pursuing this type of adventure, then finding a way to deliver just that. Best of luck!

You can check out a bit more about me here: http://www.clarkcarter.com

I think this is a great idea. I also like vayable.com but that seems to be more about guides for locations.

There are plenty of expensive trek companies but what about lower cost adventures?

I think if the platform included teachers/coaches with skills to share, that would be awesome.

Like smaller adventures could be an afternoon learning parkour, gymnastics, breakdancing or an evening learning from a chef, expert fisherman or astrologist.

While I think it would be difficult to sustain a platform by offering once in a lifetime things (like Mt Everest) the list of above things could be once a month.

I'd be more interested in meeting up with reasonably local people that have awesome skills to teach me.

AirBnB has it's awesome castles and treehouses but I think it's bread & butter are lower cost sustainable transactions by volume.

This is an incredibly hard idea. Think about the average early adopter: he/she is going to look for adventures close by, or in a certain location. What are the chances they will find a bunch of choices? It's a classic chicken and egg problem.

What you can do.. although not as sexy is to limit this to 1 specific location, say Hawaii. I know there are a couple of companies that are making nice money by referring customers to certain adventures in a specific location (you never hear them in Techcrunch or HN, mind you because they not "sexy")

Like the idea, feel like you need some aspect that helps arrange a group for these types of trips. I really want a small group whatever deal where the first guy or two to say "I'm in" gets a discount.

Do follow the other fellow's advice and try validating your idea on craigslist, couchsurfing, meetup, etc. We don't have a real website yet, but we've surprisingly got some leads through those channels.

You may also look into trying some of the REI trips that sortof do this already.

Zozi has something similar with "Gurus" (who are world class surfers, cyclists, runners, kayakers, snowboarders, etc...) that you can bid on to go on an outing with. Your idea seems interesting and if you have the passion for it, it has potential to work. You are looking at a marketplace that you have to build so attracting sellers of experiences and buyers of those experiences.

http://www.zozi.com/gurus

I like the idea, and there is a startup doing the same thing. http://www.urbanadventures.com/

Like a lot of people have said - there are professional tour guides. It seems what you're suggesting is making it easier for experts to become tour guides by handling booking, advertising, paying that sort of thing. There probably is a need for that. If you know lots of outdoor experts who could run tours but don't because they don't know how to set it up, then I'd say you should definitely do it.

Something similar to this exists for local tours, if only I could remember what it was called.

I think your biggest problem is going to be vetting the providers and managing your risk/liability. How do you plan to provide/require insurance? How are you going to deal with problems between customers and providers?

What will your vetting program look like when your providers are global?

Thanks for the feedback people. All great points and worth considering. I am inclined to focus on outdoor adventure rather than the looser 'experiences/tours' approach. A system pointed out by a couple of people (thanks!) that I particularly like is to wait until you get a minimum amount of interested people before going ahead with the adventure.

Keep the thoughts coming.

I like the idea, and know a number of people that would be keen to use it on both the supply and demand sides. Note that this is a bit similar to Zozi's "Gurus": www.zozi.com

Worth poking around and understanding if those economics have worked out for them / how this might be different (from a business model perspective)

YC funded: vayable.com

I like the concept quite a bit, but the devil is in the details (as always). A similar idea was attempted by findmefit, with a focus on fitness events and yoga practice, but I think they had a lot of trouble getting traction.

Ideas are a penny a piece.

Re-ask this question after you have an MVP and post the URL. At the least it will be good implementation experience.

Yeah, Vayable YC s12 is doing pretty much exactly this:

http://www.vayable.com/

At first I thought it would be cool to call this "Adventure Time," but then I realized that you might receive a few lawsuits.

validate your idea..run some craigslist ads to gauge some interest. Validate it without wasting time and money

Gidsy is the biggest player in this space, and YC recently funded a competitor called Vayable.

I would love to use something like this.

Glad to here it Steven. Quick question. Would you be looking to go on hard (Everest) or soft (Surfing at Bondi) adventures? Both equally good in my books.