Fiz is looking to tap into the big data, geo-location and social graph trends out there to bring together leisure time, longer travel and social content.
The team behind the newbie are co-founders David and Sarah Hughes, with David formerly working across many of the UK's tour operators while Sarah has been a digital strategy consultant. The husband and wife team are joined by Murad Hajeebhoy, former Expedia vice president of emerging markets as director of strategic partnerships and Matt Cooper, formerly co-founder of ThisTribe, as chief technology officer.
To date the company has developed using seed funding of £200K ($305k) from the co-founders, Hajeebhoy and another private investor.
Fiz acknowledges the breadth of competition in the 'place discovery-travel research and social networking' sphere and sees the likes of Roamz, Everplaces and Gogobot as potential rivals.
It is also not complacent about the amount of travel and leisure related content being shared across Google+, Twitter and Facebook but says the Fiz emphasis is on following places and not people. It feels its USP will be in aggregating the best user generated content about a place and pinpointing the right places for the things you love to do.
While revenue will be drawn from affiliate commissions, the ability for third parties and partners to leverage the place discovery platform and search intelligence is also key to the commercial model.
Describe what your start-up does, what problem it solves (differently to what is already out there) and for whom?
Fiz is a place discovery platform that is all about pinpointing the right places for the things you love to do. Unlike other location-aware services, Fiz brings together valuable user-generated content on places from a host of sources (Google, Foursquare, Panoramio, Streetview with Facebook and Yelp coming online soon) and adds a voting system to it so that users can rate places on what they are ‘great for’.
This should make it easier for people to zero in on places they want to spend time at, or activities they want to enjoy, without having to engage in lots of research across multiple sites for reassurance. This concept of pinpointing places that match your leisure needs works just as well for everyday leisure as for trip planning, main holidays and more adventurous experiences.
So we hope we shorten the time it takes to know where you are going to spend that precious leisure time of yours, or what you can get up to if you pick a certain accommodation spot or holiday destination. Our target customer is the activity or leisure planner or traveller – the person who seeks somewhere to go not for the destination alone but for what they can get up to when there.
Fiz is a platform and not only an app. As a platform we will adjust what we provide for the on-the-go experience, typically when you are out and about carrying your smartphone, or the browse and enjoy experience, sat on the sofa perhaps with the kids around the tablet, and the website where you might want lots of functionality that’s quick, accurate and nicely layered so that you consume as much or as little as you want.
Nevertheless, we’re thrilled by the idea that we can create the right intelligent tools for people, and partners, to showcase the best places for people’s interests and passions. Bringing places to life is our mission and at the core of that are votes for places!
Why should people or companies use your startup?
We’ve worked hard on the app to make sure that it is as useful as it is informative. Obviously this depends on the place you view – so a butcher shop may show much less user-generated content than a cathedral. We’ve tried to aggregate enough to make sure that if you are thinking of visiting somewhere, or are there at the place, you will have a lot of what you need in the palm of your hand. That could be as simple as weather, directions, traffic updates if you are in the UK, and a meet up facility, or it could be richer and timely when you read an invaluable tip or review.
We’ve done this not simply off the back of pulling in other service’s data (via their API’s) but off a unique and intelligent search platform we are building that can serve partners, channels and products as well as the Fiz community of users. We are also building up our own unique data on key venues. So we are keen to continue the talks we’ve begun with travel partners and major venues and attractions and get to a solution that is distributed rather than centralised.
In that way, the beauty of Fiz is that you find it where you need it and you may not have to change your travel habits or preferences too much.
Other than going viral and receiving mountains of positive PR, what is the strategy for raising awareness and getting customers/users?
In the past few months we have been very much immersed in technical development and in ‘customer discovery’ as we have called it. The feedback has been terrific and we are very excited by our version 2 app that will be coming out before the summer. Our seed funding is modest, however, and although we think that in true British fashion we can show how to take a little a long way, we don’t have any big bucks to throw at brand awareness and cold marketing.
So we are going to focus on a few things; on partner channels including a hotels service, on launching a thank you rewards system for our top sharers who earn points on the app, and on some fun, ambient and guerrilla marketing ideas that we hope will capture people’s attention and remind them that there are great places all around us and that a little bit of leisure can occur daily if you want it to.
We also have an exciting website around the corner, which will showcase our place content feeds we initially we will be offering as a free b2b free service for third party websites who want a little bit of Fiz.
How did your initial idea evolve? Were there changes/any pivots along the way? What other options have you considered for the business if the original vision fails?
You have to start with a concept but in a volatile and changing marketplace you can’t follow it unswervingly. Our core concept is about bringing places to life. We believe that if we can achieve that we can make it easier for people to choose what will best suit their leisure and travel needs. Working in travel we’ve seen a divide between the top down approach and the bottom up. The top down is a prescriptive holiday package. The bottom up involves lots of legwork by the customer.
Some middle ground has developed but has rapidly become fragmented. This means vast numbers of ‘marketing’ and inspiration websites all leading to a click though for fulfilment. The social graph has caused recommendations and friending to mushroom, and content has proliferated but it’s still just as hard to finally settle on the right trip, or excursion or holiday for you.
If the end goal is to monetise a travel customer, then should we not find a way to bring together the best of the existing and emerging worlds? I’m not saying we know how to cut neatly through all of this, and there is likely much more change to come, but we are about the fusion of travel, leisure and places! We hope we can build an intelligent travel search that will be part of the solution for lots of players and at the end of the day, this will make it easier for customers to pinpoint the things they love to do in places they want to visit.
Where do you see yourselves in 3 years time, what specific challenges do you hope to have overcome?
We’re in this for the long haul. In 3 years we hope our data intelligence will be being used by a large number of key travel properties and that the concept of places powering people’s destination choices will be proven to be highly worthwhile.
In this way we can complement and not compete with the big players and emerging trends. We want to position ourselves to be the ‘authority’ on user-generated and crowd-sourced place information. We are already live with Foursquare and Google venue data, (which includes tips and reviews), merged with Fiz venues, and a variety of other data sources.
The next steps are to integrate some of the other big venue and image providers and wrap this into a master record. I’m not sure there are many businesses which can confidently say exactly where they will be in three years, but I know that with the technical assets we have, our team, a strong core proposition as a business and an ability to react quickly to the market, we can be confident of giving a positive update when you follow up with us next year.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
Plenty! Fragmentation is making it more painful rather than less painful for people to pinpoint what they want to do and where they wish to go. We, as leisure travellers, have to put up with DOD searches (destination, occupancy, duration). We should call it a Dud search, and I think there is an increasing awareness that this needs to change.
I’m not a huge advocate of the emerging view that your ‘friends’ are the best source of travel recommendations, but crowd-sourced intelligence, if properly weighted and served through a single point of reference on a place, destination or venue, will become increasing valuable when making your travel and leisure choices. That’s what we’re here for.
Tnooz view:
This is an ambitious startup - lots of people are doing social travel but social travel covering all leisure and travel via all favourite places is a tall order. My favourite place may not be yours so getting enough votes to make meaningful recommendations that aren't just 'same ol same ol' could be an issue.
Then there's the challenge of getting enough content on there but offering it to b2b customers initially for free, especially those with an engaged audience, could help there and is also likely help in terms of eyeballs. As for 'guerilla marketing' - we say bring it on.
At this early stage in the game it feels a bit all things to all men but perhaps as time evolves the startup will be led down a particular path according to votes or partners or something we don't even know about yet.
All of that said the mere idea of being able to go somewhere that might be able to suggest great places for a few hours out, a day or even longer, is exciting. Anything that aggregates information in a useful way has got to be a good thing.
In addition, the strategy of b2c and b2b is a wise one.
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NB:TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.