Long gone are the days in which traveling meant a complete disconnect from the hallmarks of everyday life: phone calls were left unanswered, mail piled up, and family eagerly awaited the latest written dispatch from afar.
Today, the always-on reality of the modern condition has permeated every facet of the travel experience - which sometimes ends up making travel a big communication pain. Friends and family expect instant updates, and quickly get worried without hearing from the digital you - have you made it? Where in the world are you? Are you safe?
A new startup called Oh Hey World attempts to ameliorate this process, by facilitating automatic check-ins and more.
From the team:
Oh Hey World enables you to share your arrival in a new city with those who care -- via text, email, Facebook, Twitter, and even to a WordPress.org blog -- with one simple click.
Some travelers are very comfortable broadcasting their travels publicly, but others only want to notify a few people when they arrive in a new destination. We facilitate both public and private check-ins that accommodate all travelers to ensure the people who need to know, know -- and those who don’t, well, don’t.
That single click logs your travels throughout the globe so you and future generations have insight into your life’s travel history. We focus on creating the most amazing experience possible from the moment the wheels hit the ground or your train arrives at the station.
Co-founded by Drew Myers and Eric Roland, the 4-person team has been entirely self-funded to date. While the idea had germinated back in the summer of 2012, it idea gained traction when Drew was traveling around Cambodia in February of 2012.
The Tnooz Q&A with co-founder Drew Meyers.
How is the way you are solving this problem more special or effective than previous attempts you or the market has seen before and how different do you have to be to succeed?
What’s the first thing you do when the wheels hit the ground or the train arrives at the station? You turn your phone on. All your goals when you arrive -- including notifying your parents you’ve arrived safely, updating your travel blog, transportation to your accommodations, knowing the best nearby bike trail for tomorrow’s ride, knowing which long lost friends live in the area, and the location of the best Thai restaurant in town for dinner -- needs to be at your fingertips -- and accomplished with one click.
We’re turning the moment when you arrive in a new destination from the current mess it is today to a seamless experience driven from the palm of your hand. When we deliver on that, we’ll have succeeded.
We’re focused on building a lasting consumer travel brand that will endure for years to come. Of course, that includes making money, but we aren’t revealing our exact revenue plans yet. The trick is getting to scale, that’s where where the rubber meets the road. When we build a large consumer audience currently traveling and planning future travels, monetization won’t be an issue. Let’s just say we have an idea or two -- and leave it at that.
Why should people or companies use your startup?
It’s no secret the travel industry is a massive one -- the sheer number of startups entering the market strongly indicates there is a big opportunity sitting out there. Comscore just released a press release that spending in online travel surpassed $100 billion in 2012. There were 983 million international arrivals in 2011, and probably over a billion in 2012. Right there is a billion arrivals we can do a better job of facilitating. And, that’s just airlines. For many international travelers, a large chunk of their arrivals are via bus, train and boat throughout the world.
Most of the actions we’re facilitating still happen via email, text, social media, and phone. At a broader scale, GoGoBot, Tripit, TripAdvisor, and CouchSurfing are all in the space we’re targeting. That said, there’s room for many players in the market. We’re aware of what others are doing, but we know we can do it better and can excel over others by facilitating the most amazing and convenient travel experience possible.
If you always traveled to the same spot, traveling would be easy. As any traveler knows, that’s a pipe dream. Every trip is different. You want partners in the process to make the most out of your travels. Those partners are trusted travelers with deep knowledge of the area you are going to next.
Tracking and getting the most out of the people who know most about a given area is a full time job. I know, since I’ve been traveling for the past three years. Shannon knows since she’s been traveling for four years. We’re focused on providing you the tools to manage and optimize your own travel network, and tap into the broader Oh Hey World community for trusted contacts in areas your own network doesn’t cover.
Our belief is that by connecting travelers with the right people -- either ahead of time for advice or at destination to spend time with -- travelers will get the information they need to make the most of their travels. Big picture, we’re building a marketplace for unique travel knowledge, tailored to you.
On top of giving you the tools to get the most out of the Oh Hey World network, we stay on the leading edge of the travel, technology, and business worlds - and relay all those learnings into a better travel experience. We are committed to not only facilitating the best travel experience, but maintaining it as the community's needs shift. The travel landscape is constantly changing, as is your travel profile (I’m a very different traveler than I was three years ago) and travelers need a partner committed to adapting and growing with them. Your trusted travel companion. That’s us.
Beyond that, we’re the travel company that gives a sh*t about leaving the world a better place -- and means it. We’re here to provide utility, not entertainment -- being part of the time suck economy is not our cup of tea. We’re building a travel community for those who desire to not only explore this vast world we live in, but leave the communities they visit better off than when they went.
Other than going viral and receiving mountains of positive PR, what is the strategy for raising awareness and getting customers/users?
Getting customers comes down to one simple thing: a great product that addresses a pain point in their lives. For five years, I worked for a now-billion dollar company (Zillow) and saw it grow from zero to 13M users (now upwards of 45M) from the inside -- and we did it by focusing relentlessly on building the best product possible that solved the pain points of the real estate buyer and seller; not by spending a bunch of money advertising or fancy marketing. We’re going to take the same approach at Oh Hey World. We’re spending our time focused on creating a great product to streamline the entire travel process, and will let our work speak for itself. Fortunately, travel is one of the few industries where sharing is built into almost every stage of the process already. By nailing the user experience and providing value to travelers at the right time, the sharing and users will take care of themselves.
What other options have you considered for the business and the team if the original vision fails?
We’re not focused on shifting our vision given we haven’t even launched publicly yet. Like Twitter’s initial strategy, we created a flexible platform with tools such as lists, tagging, and search, that can be utilized in a number of ways by the travel community to organize themselves around their passions, experiences, and trust levels. We understand that Oh Hey World users’ needs are not all the same, and each person may use the platform slightly differently.
The key is flexibility. We’re excited to observe how the community uses the tools we’ve given them to facilitate a connected travel experience with those who matter. Who knows, maybe it’ll be very different user behavior than we’re expecting. That’s the fun of early stage startups.
What mistakes have you made in the past in business and how have you learned from them?
One mistake we made at Zillow early on was not realizing how big an issue incorrect home facts was going to be with homeowners. Post launch, our 2nd biggest buck of feedback was homeowners saying “my home facts are incorrect” (if my memory serves me correctly seven years later, 75% of early feedback in 2006 was estimate accuracy & incorrect home facts). We absolutely planned to add the ability for owners to update their home facts, but we had to shift priorities once we realized how big of an issue it was and make it the very next feature to build. The important takeaway was the art of listening, and changing course if needed.
At Oh Hey World, one mistake we’ve already made and adjusted for is that we didn’t focus on mobile initially -- likely due to the fact that I’ve been traveling for three years without data coverage for my mobile phone, but we’ve redesigned the whole site to be a mobile-first experience as a result of the feedback we’ve gotten over the past few months in private beta. We’re not stopping there though; our emphasis for the next phase, which is a limited public beta, is a controlled growth period where we can continue to adjust the user experience and feature set before a widespread public launch.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
That’s simple. No one has nailed the user experience and created a great travel experience. When you see a chart that shows Google Maps as the top travel brand with 16% penetration and MapQuest 2nd on the list with 8% penetration - that spells an opportunity. The whole travel industry is fragmented - every week there seems to be a new travel site to try, most of which require your current location and future trip plans to work.
Since that isn’t changing anytime soon, we created the single platform to communicate your location across them all (we’ve already built an API and a WordPress plugin on top of it). Our goal is to cohesively pull in friends and information from other platforms -- organize, understand, and manipulate it to create the most amazing travel experience possible for the user.
Don’t get me wrong, building a B2C brand at scale is ridiculously hard (I saw the first five years of Zillow’s growth), and most certainly doesn’t happen overnight. That said, someone will truly emerge as a market leader in the travel vertical. We’re betting on that leader being Oh Hey World.
Tnooz take:
It's interesting to see a startup take a different tack in the "trip planning/trip resource" path. The travel ecosystem is full of so-called "social travel planning" tools, which offer connections to friends as the key to successful trip planning. But what happens once you arrive at the destination? This is a clear weak-point, with few consumer-facing solutions.
The truth of travel today is that of a mobile-centric reality. Travelers clutch their mobile phones almost more than their passports, as they are the gateway to information that can lubricate even the most friction-filled travel experience. They can also be shackles, however, causing anxiety and the feeling of having to post immediately to one's networks.
By providing an automated update feature, travelers are freed to focus on documenting the things that mean the most to them - and also given an added safety net in case of a true emergency.
There also seems to be an opportunity for one company to insert itself into the travelers' worlds so intricately that they cannot imagine living without it. TripIt is like that for some, but has limited uptake in the consumer space. Other trip planning tools do not address the long-term traveler. Facebook has become too broad and not focused on a feature set that would appeal to travelers. If done right, there is an opportunity to become the go-to digital gateway for an engaged - and very valuable, demographically - customer base.
It's still too early to tell how this will all pan out. The "seamless experience driven from the palm of your hand" is ambitious -and very intoxicating to those seeking a true one-stop solution.
Snap poll:
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