persistence. a better UI. and community feeling - invite users to signup for itinerary authors - and have a subsection of such 'community written' itineraries at a reduced rate. authors get a %. that would ^ word of mouth among travel and expat forums, blogs, social.
Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now?
31–40 of 43 posts
Re: Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now?
#32I had a similar idea sometime ago. I think you can try a ton of things before deciding that it's failing.
Let users create their own guides, which they can share with others for free. User generated content can be a huge driver of traffic. Then your business model becomes freemium. Normal users' guides are free, but you pay a little for "expert" guides.
Get professional tour guides on board. For example, in the UK we have blue badge guides who are certified. Getting them on your site will add some credibility.
Make some deals with existing tour companies, either to offer discounts through your site or just a cut of ticket sales.
Have you considered selling your existing guides as ebooks on Amazon or other platforms? Even if you have some awesome guides, I don't know about them because I've never heard of your site. I do go to Amazon to buy travel guides when I'm travelling. If I see your guides show up in the search, I will at least look at a sample on my Kindle. You could do both - have some free guides for promotion and have some cheap ones to make some revenue.
Have you considered selling hard copies of your guides? Most people don't have a way to read a PDF when they are travelling.
Use the Foursquare API to show a "hot destinations" chart on the homepage. Show where people are checking in and link to your guides for those places.
Use buysellads or call businesses directly to place very targeted ads on the site. Affiliate links for tickets and hotel bookings may also work. AirBNB has an affiliate program - ride their success wave.
There are lots more things you could try. The important things I feel are generating lots more content and being creative about distribution channels.
Re: Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now?
#33I looked at the 2 itineraries available for my city and it was the typical tourist attractions. Like others have commented they're already widely recommended online and in print guidebooks. If I made an itinerary for a friend i'd recommend specific niche places the locals go relevant to their interests.
What if you bump the price up to $20+ per itinerary then offered more value by having each itinerary custom made to match each customer's personal interests. Maybe also have the 'local experts' who made the guide ranked like a restaurant on yelp to build up trust.
Re: Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now?
#34I looked at the 2 itineraries available for my city and it was the typical tourist attractions. Like others have commented they're already widely recommended online and in print guidebooks. If I made an itinerary for a friend i'd recommend specific niche places the locals go relevant to their interests. What if you bump the price up to $20+ per itinerary then offered more value by having each itinerary custom made to…
Well the idea was to build a marketplace in the hope that we would get lots of different itineraries for each location, with each one tackling the city from a different angle. It would be up to the individuals to write itineraries how they deemed fit, and the review/rating process would make sure the best ones were highlighted.
Unfortunately, so far we have had to seed the marketplace with itineraries which are costing us $100+ each, so we dont have the luxury of making many itineraries for each city.
Also, each itinerary takes many weeks to write - $20 just wouldn't cover the expenses of bespoke itineraries.
Re: Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now?
#35The problem is that you need to connect with the person who is traveling at exactly the right time. too soon and you lose mind-share, too late and it's no longer necessary. you need to figure out the delivery mechanism that works well. Maybe see if you can partner up with groupon travel destinations as an adder and offer them a split of it. so if groupon sells a hotel package in Chicago you should be offering your Ch…
Thanks for the great ideas - some of our thinking has been along the same lines. One of our biggest barriers is funds, which means we have to push as hard and fast as we can before we are totally depleted.
Design is something on our list, but neither of us are designers, and getting a good design will cost a fair amount.
We have tried to provide them in physical format, but the price significantly exceeds that of a travel guide - I'm not sure if it makes sense.
We haven't considered the fandango route - I guess it is a revenue stream that we should investigate.
The iphone app is coming... but its not feature packed, because we had to outsource it, and as always, funds are limited.
Re: Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now?
#36Have you tried promoting on Adwords, go for long tail keywords, optimize, optimize, optimize? Have you done A/B testing on your landing pages? Have you thought about installing an affiliate program?
We have done many tests with Adwords - our margins are tiny, and adwords doesn't seem to work for us. We are still testing this, but we are not even close - we are many, many miles away. I'm sure we are missing something with adwords, but we have tried a lot, but still not succeeded.
We have a very basic discount/promo system, but building an affiliate system takes time, and we haven't had any requests for it, so it is not at the top of our roadmap.
Re: Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now?
#37persistence. a better UI. and community feeling - invite users to signup for itinerary authors - and have a subsection of such 'community written' itineraries at a reduced rate. authors get a %. that would ^ word of mouth among travel and expat forums, blogs, social.
Thanks for the suggestions. We are currently giving our itinerary authors 75% of the sales - and that has got the word out a bit (just not enough I guess).
Trying to build a social community is something we should possibly try, but it will take a lot of time - and we weren't convinced it would catch on.
Re: Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now?
#38I think people love "the idea" of your idea. People love to imagine they're off on a vacation to Paris, and they'll have so much to think of, they'll probably want a locally-authored tour guide. So they're excited about traveling, going to Paris and finding lots of cool things to do there. But not necessarily from your guide books. When the time comes to actually go to Paris, the problem for you guys is that there's…
There is definitely some resistance to paying for travel information when so much of it is available for free - I totally agree with you on that. However, our product is more aimed at short trips, where investing in lots of time to research the destination just doesn't make sense.
I feel like $4.99 is a reasonable price considering the amount of time it saves you.
What would you consider a reasonable price? Or specifically... what would be your own personal "too expensive" threshold?
Re: Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now?
#39Keep contracting to pay the bills. As you guys save up some cash, hire a designer to make the pages prettier. So many people will disregard the praise for your site if it's ugly or they can't figure it out. Edit: A little more food for thought - I opened the page you linked, then went to the homepage, then closed the page. It just didn't appeal to me visually. It wasn't until I saw the comment about charging too much…
Thanks! I think you're right and a great idea. We've discussed a redesign for a while now. We couldn't justify the cost when we were bootstrapping. Now that some cash will begin to roll in again I think it would be worth it.
Email me at inlith@gmail.com. I might be able to help you out with the site redesign.
I am a freelance web designer and i love helping out startups with tight budgets. My portfolio is at madebyargon.com
Re: Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now?
#40The problem is that you need to connect with the person who is traveling at exactly the right time. too soon and you lose mind-share, too late and it's no longer necessary. you need to figure out the delivery mechanism that works well. Maybe see if you can partner up with groupon travel destinations as an adder and offer them a split of it. so if groupon sells a hotel package in Chicago you should be offering your Ch…
Thanks for the great ideas - some of our thinking has been along the same lines. One of our biggest barriers is funds, which means we have to push as hard and fast as we can before we are totally depleted. Design is something on our list, but neither of us are designers, and getting a good design will cost a fair amount. We have tried to provide them in physical format, but the price significantly exceeds that of a t…
I'd say go for the print version with the expectation that not too many people are going to buy it. There is a well known psyhcological device called price fixing that shows that people are more likely to buy/pay more for the mid range option when presented with a high priced option. Look at the basecamp signup page for this. People are predictably irrational. (check out that book for more good stuff like this; chapter 1 in particular for this example)
Do you get to own the code for the iPhone app or are you beholden to one company for updates?