STARTUP STAGE: ViaHero pairs travelers with local experts who plan their trips

ViaHero

ViaHero is a trip-planning service that connects travelers with local experts who plan personalized itineraries for them.

Currently the service is available in Cuba, Japan and Colombia. 

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Our marketplace allows travelers to hire locals to plan their trip. For $25 to 35 per day, the locals, aka Heroes, build a personalized guidebook based on your interests and budget, arrange anything you need on the ground and consult you on where to go, what to do and how to do it. All information in the guidebook is viewed in an offline app during your trip, so you don’t need any access to data or WiFi. 

What inspired you to create this company?

While traveling to over 45 countries, I saw how powerful it was to be in the know ahead of your trip. Having local insight of where to go, what to do and how to do it enabled me to personally be as confident traveling in a foreign country as I was in my hometown. I got to dive in deeper and learn more about the local way of life. 

I’ve also spent time as a travel agent, and I saw three things wrong with the current model:

• Trust: The agent’s revenue model is tied to commissions, mostly from tour packages, which incentivizes the agent to make your trip more expensive and less personalized.
• Local knowledge: The agent often lacks real local knowledge, and money-saving techniques. A local can help a traveler get a lot more out of their experience because they know of all of the possibilities that exist in their city or country.
• Deliverable: The travel agent is focused on delivering bookings, since this is how they make their income, but we’ve found that the average traveler is more interested in a focus on trip-planning assistance.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

• Strengths: Our end product that travelers receive, and our network of local Heroes who want to spread the word. Our net promoter score (NPS) is 82 across 6,000 travelers so far.
• Weaknesses: Convincing people to spend money on a new line item in their travel budget, even though it saves them money in the end.
• Opportunities: Launching in more markets that people want to travel to will allow our strong word-of-mouth referral network to really take off.
• Threats: A big player deciding to do this before we get escape velocity.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

Planning a trip yourself is time‐consuming, intimidating and stressful. The problem nowadays is that there is too much information, so it’s overwhelming to try to plan your trip. Using a travel agent usually ends up costing more money and ends up being less personalized. Tour packages and guided trips are expensive and lack independence.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

SEO, SEM and word-of-mouth referrals. (Did I mention our NPS score is 82?)

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

We started by doing user testing as a travel agent and providing different services. A personalized guidebook and on‐the‐ground arrangements really allowed people to feel like they were taking the travel planning burden off of their plate, but still feel like they could get the ideal experience and remain independent during their trip. We’ve launched in Cuba, Japan and Colombia and confirmed that this service is something that people really love. 

How and when will you make money?

We make money now via the trip-planning fee that the local Hero charges, which amounts to $25 to 35 per day, and we keep a portion of the fee. 

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team, and why do you have what it takes to succeed with this business?

Greg Buzulencia , founder and CEO: He grew a previous startup from three employees to a team of 40 and an exit with Amazon. He also has spent the last 20 years in and out of the travel agent industry, and has a keen understanding of exactly what people want when planning their trip.

Rachel Hawkes, founder and vice president of product: She was the director of operations at a translation company, has a linguistics background and can effectively communicate what really resonates with users about ViaHero.

Danielle Reyes, director of operations: After operationalizing global expansion for Uber, Startup Weekend and Techstars, Danielle has a sixth sense on what it takes to expand into new markets.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Every founder thinks that the most difficult part of founding a business is building the right product. That’s easy: Listen to your customers. The most difficult part is growing and operating a team under constrained resources.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact ‐ so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

People love our product (have I mentioned that our NPS score is 82?) and our customer acquisition cost is 10% of our net revenue.