alt Hacker NewsI strongly believe pitch competitions are negatively correlated with success because they bias for ideas that are easy to validate which means there’s probably a non-obvious reason it hasn’t been done already.
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.
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Thank you for the information. If you have any other advice please tell me I'm very grateful for any advice
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).
Success isn’t really the point. These competitions are a fun way to meet other people with entrepreneurial interest. You can work together in a team to build something quick together and if you like them you can keep in touch and maybe do something more serious later on. Most ideas at these weekends will be undercooked, and will need a few non-obvious pivots to be viable businesses.
an economist sees a 20 dollar note on the floor. Doesn't pick it up. If it was there, someone would have picked it up already.
"Gym access, comfortable accommodations, sightseeing, custom meal plans"
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.