
Ask HN: We were told our idea is amazing, but our startup is failing - what now? - Mamady
Just over a year ago my co-founder and I started working on our startup full-time. As we developed the product and talked to other people, everyone said our startup is an amazing idea. I even had a situation where a total stranger that I was pitching to, took out her iphone and ordered our product right in front of me - it was amazing.<p>Our customers also love our product and the feedback has been extremely positive. We didn’t just ask friends and family - we actually validated our product before we committed to it full-time.<p>Our startup is in the travel industry, we put a new spin on the traditional travel guide. After many months work, we have finally managed to cover most of the popular tourist destinations in the world. We are making sales, but it's a trickle - nowhere near enough to support us.<p>Here is an example of our product: http://bit.ly/szvH36<p>We bootstrapped and have reach the end of our funds. Attempts to get incubated via Chile, YC and Techstars have so far been unsuccessful. We haven't gained enough momentum to approach angels.<p>I had to go back to contract work to start paying bills, but I am still moonlighting on our startup. My cofounder is going to be in a similar situation very soon.<p>This is what puzzles me... how is it possible that everyone thinks our idea is good, but we haven't managed to gain momentum?<p>Any thoughts, ideas or feedback on how to keep the company afloat would be great.
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SHOwnsYou
Keep 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 that I even realized
you sold something.

So on the cost thing - split test! Run a test between $5 and $10. Seriously.
Combine a pretty product with a price that seems just barely over the limit
and you will likely find that people are finding your product "re-assuringly
expensive". It costs $10 and it's pretty. It must be a high quality itinerary.

~~~
LifeAfterCubes
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.

~~~
ashraful
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

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Iaks
My immediate feedback is that you are charging too much. I can buy a travel
book which details hundreds of things about SF for ~$20, used $10. I can get a
Google itinerary for many places for free.

Second, this seems like an impulse buy sort of item. ( i.e. I'm stuck visiting
somewhere new but haven't had time to research it.) A mobile app that allowed
quick access to new itineraries via gps look-up might make for a better sales
rate. But I don't see anything changing until your price-point accounts for
the competition's prices.

~~~
mapster
good point, but being on the webpage looking at a focused itinerary of a place
I am going to is much more compelling than buying a one size fits all guide
book. And for the cost of parking ($7.50), it seems well priced.

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davidst
Take heart: Without AdWords, Google itself was an idea that was amazing but a
failing startup. You need a better revenue model than competing with cheap
guidebooks.

Here's one idea: Give it away but include coupons for each stop on the
itinerary. It's Groupon for travelers. Consider offering an app so people can
easily carry it with them and it will always be up-to-date with the latest
destinations and deals.

~~~
LifeAfterCubes
Thanks! I mentioned this below, but we're running a small test with
essentially this approach. We're giving away the itinerary for free and then
trying to upsell/cross-sell other related services -- such as a San Francisco
CityPass, tours and p2p experiences. If you'd like to take a look you can
check it out here (you'll have to enter your email address to get the free
itinerary) -- <http://bit.ly/enWxWz>

My concern with partnering with restaurants and retailers is that I feel like
it's a slippery slope to disingenuous recommendations. Plus, why would a
restaurant offer a coupon to a traveler (at least a coupon of value)? There's
no chance of repeat business. Just some thoughts, would love to get more
feedback, if you have any.

~~~
davidst
> Plus, why would a restaurant offer a coupon to a traveler (at least a coupon
> of value)?

Because it brings in business. I see restaurants advertising for tourists all
the time. Look in any in-flight magazine or any of the free guidebooks that
are given away in tourist areas. They're full of ads and coupons for tours,
restaurants, museums and attractions. That's a business model worth
investigating.

The downside is it's a real boots-on-the-ground business that requires a heavy
investment in sales effort to make it work. The upside is that once you sign
up a customer (assuming they have a positive experience) it is highly likely
they will repeat. You could start with just one city and if it works grow it
from there.

Good luck to you!

~~~
LifeAfterCubes
Fair enough -- I was thinking more along the lines of a Groupon type coupon.

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weaksauce
The 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 Chicago package. I think living social
offers vacation packages too.

You can offer a few different levels of service too: default is web/you print
at home. You can offer a full color printed version with the order if you want
as well. logistically this is harder but it seems like more of a deal.

There is also the fandango way of doing it too. offer the ability to prepay
for the tickets and take a small commission off the top for that. that's
tougher to sell to the consumer because you don't have the trust relationship
and might leave them stranded at the venue with no valid tickets. It would be
slick to have this so that they didn't have to wait in line at all. make it
opt in though and let them select what they want to actually go to see/do.

An iPhone app that has everything integrated would be great but it could also
be as easy as just an interface for the pdf. If you got it into the appstore
you would increase your visibility a bit especially if you target the "what
should I do in x" queries with adwords that linked to a specific version of
your app. you could also have inapp purchases that would download a new guide.
cross selling in your apps is a good thing in this case.

pretty interesting idea. I'd probably buy the sf one if I go there ever but
you have to reach me at the right time....

~~~
Mamady
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.

~~~
weaksauce
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?

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revorad
I 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.

------
cnorgate
I think your business model might be wrong. As Iaks points out below, the $5
price point is not far from that of a used travel book.

Perhaps offer the content free, then work with top restaurants and retailers
on the 'tours' you recommend and get them to offer coupons / deals or
advertising, of which you can get a cut. People touring a city will get
hungry, and if you can point them to a great place, they'll thank you.

~~~
LifeAfterCubes
We're running a small test with essentially this approach. We're giving away
the itinerary for free and then trying to upsell/cross-sell other related
services -- such as a San Francisco CityPass, tours and p2p experiences. If
you'd like to take a look you can check it out here (you'll have to enter your
email address to get the free itinerary) -- <http://bit.ly/enWxWz>

My concern with partnering with restaurants and retailers is that I feel like
it's a slippery slope to disingenuous recommendations. Plus, why would a
restaurant offer a coupon to a traveler (at least a coupon of value)? There's
no chance of repeat business. Just some thoughts, would love to get more
feedback, if you have any.

~~~
cnorgate
Priority #1 is to remain genuine. That's what you stand for.

Restaurants might actually be more open to offering coupons to travellers - in
a sense, those customers are not repeat business, so they shouldn't be worried
about impacting their long term pricing with the local market.

Ultimately, I think you need to focus first on building enough value here with
consumers - I don't like to suggest making things free, but in this case I
think it's something you have to give away and monetize in other ways. There's
nothing bad about that approach (Google does it), but it does require a higher
volume of users for it to make sense.

Good luck!

------
anthony_franco
The problem is that even though you have a great idea, that's only one part of
the equation. To have a successful product you have to have four aspects: the
market, marketing, design, features - in that order (got that from "Start
Small, Stay Small".

Everyone could say that the features in your product are amazing. But if
you're in a market where customers don't pay, or if you're unable to reach
them with the right marketing, then a perfect product is useless.

You have to determine the most profitable segment of your market. And find the
cheapest way to market to them. What's the expected lifetime value of a user?
Is it less than the cost to acquire that user through Adwords/Facebook? Then
run through some ads. And invest some time in learning to optmize the ads.

What are some keywords that people are searching for that would lead users to
your product? Are there many people competing for those terms? It might be
worthwhile to invest time/money doing SEO. It seems you have a lot of content
that might be worthwhile.

You've solved the hard part of having a good product. Now you have to figure
out how to market it well.

~~~
AznHisoka
Personally, I think they solved the easy part.. and the hard part is left.
Creating a product is easy these days, but getting traction is like black
magic.

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magsafe
I 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 a TON of free information.
You're competing with the simplest of all Google searches: "What should I do
in Paris?", not to mention dozens of in-flight magazines, tourist info
packets, maps, concierges, coupon books etc etc. When you're competing with so
much free information, a $4.99 price point is too high, imho.

~~~
Mamady
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?

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roti
I don't think offering more information, or charging less, would solve your
problem. If I had wanted more information, I'd buy a guidebook. As SHOwnsYou
mentioned, it's about having (good) itinerary decisions made for me. The value
isn't in the amount of information, but the judgment that went into filtering
and digesting the over-info out there in other travel sites/books.

To complement that value, your design needs to give a sense of 'here's the
distilled gem about this city' - it should just 'hit me'. Instead, I am
presented instead with a rather drab plain page, which feels like it'd take
forever to get through to gratification.

I'd echo suggestions to look into redesigning the page to make the visual
impact, fast.

------
sixQuarks
A question for you: Why did you decide to offer these travel guides worldwide
instead of concentrating on one city first?

It seems like you should test out your ideas on one city (which is much easier
to market), then once you find a successful model, start branching out into
other cities.

You could spend some money on PPC ads on keywords such as "San Francisco
tours", "San Francisco golden gate bridge", etc, and test out different
landing pages and different types of guides.

I also think something like this would work better if the information was all
free, and people get to rate the quality of each tour. The ones with higher
ratings will be shown higher up - maybe offer prizes to authors who have
highly rated tours.

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danhodgins
Court the traffic gatekeepers who reach your target audience by pitching them
via email. In my experience asking a single direct/focused question elicits a
response at least 50% of the time.

Inbound link juice from being featured on a site that's old, trusted and
authoritative is 90% of the SEO game. Getting traffic is all about courting
and pitching traffic gatekeepers at progressive levels of difficulty/reach, so
you might as well start refining your approach.

For an inspiring read on growing your traffic check out "Crush It" by Gary
Vaynerchuk, and start getting your content and community hustle on!

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littledude
I 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.

~~~
Mamady
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.

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AznHisoka
There's little chance you'll make enough to survive selling $ itineraries... I
suggest just pivoting and becoming a consumer travel website ala TripAdvisor,
or GogoBot.. if you're not going into the ticket space, you need content, and
lots of free content.

You also need to learn more about the amount of traction it will realistically
take to make a good amount of profit. Even 1000 daily visitors won't do you
any good with your current business model. How are you gonna get visitors? You
can't just sit tight and wait.

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jph
> how is it possible that everyone thinks our idea is good, > but we haven't
> managed to gain momentum?

Because you haven't achieved product/market fit.

For example, you're trying to charge individuals who are traveling - have you
explored charging travel-related companies? I could see your app being very
compelling for travel agencies, travel book publishers, neighborhood merchant
associations, Chambers of Commerce, and businesses that want to advertise to
travelers.

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andrewhillman
Maybe you're using the wrong channels. How about reaching out to biz devs at
all the various Expedia-type sites to see if they are interested in doing a
little up-selling during check out as an affiliate or something? This would
give you targeted users who already have their wallets opened which is perfect
for an impulse purchase. I think partnerships will go along way if executed
properly.

~~~
LifeAfterCubes
I completely agree and we would love to partner with someone like this.
Talking with others who have tried going down this road, I've heard it's
difficult to impossible to land a partnership like that, so we've been
hesitant to put a lot of effort into trying. Perhaps it's time to give
partnerships a shot.

~~~
andrewhillman
Test your biz dev skills on the smaller sites first and it will help you
understand how it all works. They also won't want to dedicate massive amounts
of time to implement so make it dead simple for potential partners to serve
your data. All you need is one small break to boost your confidence.

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soho33
i'll have to agree with SHOwnsYou.

My first impression is not "Wow!". Your website design doesn't have that wow
factor with it's design. i would highly recommend either getting a design to
do some work for you or download a nice design from themeforest.

also there is no way i would pay any money to find an "itenary" because as
mentioned below i can just go on google and search for "what to do in xyz?"
and pick and choose the ones i like. so personally i would make it free, redo
the design and try and make money from the advertisement. maybe down the road
you can make deals with certain locations to add them in your itenary for a
fee? sell tickets on your site for those locations and keep a commission?
either way, charging for an itenary when anyone can just do a google search
for it doesn't make sense to me.

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teyc
$5 isn't much if you are able to demonstrate more value - example: personal
safety - what are the areas to avoid? where can you find free water fountains?
where are the best spots for a cheap meal along the route? You might be able
to raise your revenue mix if you had sponsored content.

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creativeone
Have 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?

~~~
Mamady
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.

------
silverlake
I travel a lot and wouldn't use this. Shanghai costs $5 and I don't have any
idea what might be in there. My travel book was $15 and already has
itineraries for most popular cities in China.

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mapster
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.

~~~
Mamady
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.

