For a new business entering the travel industry, it's critical that you understand your customers, where they are and what they value.
Quote from Richard Holden of Google, in an article on PhocusWire this week.
Phocuswright Europe 2018 Preview: Q&A with Google's Richard Holden
For the startup embarking on the often tough road that is the travel industry, such advice can be met with a shrug of the shoulders and a flippant "of course, we know all of these things".
The travel startup graveyard in the sky paints another picture, sadly.
Perhaps things aren't as bad as they used to be, though. Circa 2009 to 2011, many a travel startup competition would be littered with a founder explaining how the idea for the business came from personal experience.
"My mate Jimmy and I were traveling around South East Asia for a year, and we realized that there was nowhere - NOWHERE! - online where we could plan our trip, find other people to connect with and share our experiences."
There was a good reason for this, except the said founder and Jimmy hadn't realised it yet.
What was missing in the planning phase after that apparent eureka moment and then spending a lot of time creating a new business was what is known as customer discovery.
In the case of our digitally deprived backpackers, a deep analysis of the sector and traveler behaviour in the real world and on social media would have shown that 1) Facebook was already servicing a lot of those requirements and 2) at scale, travelers were not crying out to get involved in such a site.
Customer discovery brings about some degree of knowledge on the points that Holden raises, giving new businesses an empirical and ultimately valuable snapshot of the likelihood that a new business is both needed and can survive.
Startups are hard things to get off the ground, build into something meaningful, and push forward into viable businesses that can attract investment and new customers.
What hinders the success of many startups is what appears to be a leap-frogging of the customer discovery process.
Perhaps it is laziness, time, or something around pride whereby the founders don't want to discover (no pun intended) that their great idea wasn't so great after all.
Whatever the reason, performing this vital task can help avoid many of the pitfalls that travel startups find themselves facing often fairly soon after the Great Idea moves from the pen and paper phase to reality.