BUTU is a San Francisco startup whose tagline for its website and iOS app is "a better place to plan your trips."
The free BUTU iOS app and website allows travelers to generate visual trip plans -- or post-trip reports -- and easily share them.
It's reminiscent of Dopplr, a UK startup that was a media darling but whose idea may have been ahead of its time and has since died.
Butu, which is self-funded, is a two-person team in Silicon Valley became full-time committed to the project since the 1st quarter of 2013.
It launched an iOs app in May, claiming more than 12,000 users. They launched a website in July and then with a redesign in September, claiming a monthly growth rate in visitors at 100%.
They see the project on drawing on themes in many of the major themes in digital travel right now, including "Big Data, Artificial intelligence, Context-Aware Computing, Natural language processing, etc."
Vine video about BUTU:
Q&A with co-founder Willa Dong:
Tell us how you founded the company, why and what made you decide to create the business.
Jianming shared his wife’s frustration during the trip planning, such as disjointed service, information overload and a lot of brainwork required to gather relevant information for decision making. I had the exactly same feeling. We tried to explore some better options, none of them are quite satisfying.
Later we decided to build something ourselves after we talked to more friends and strangers through comprehensive surveys which further verified the need is common.
We started with what we wanted fundamentally; later, we talked to more potential users (friends and strangers) and industry veterans to get much deeper insights. We gradually received very positive feedback from more early adopters.
We launched an iOs app in May 2013, then our travel dashboard released in July 2013. We updated our site in September 2013 with over 300 amazing trip reports/trip plans from real travelers. We plan to have another mobile update soon.
Everyone loves to read trip reports. This is always the most popular section on the website/forum! We are targeting those travelers who don't have much publicity or many followers, but their travel stories are unique with great content to attract readers. This is a gold mine for us to explore.
Size of the team, names of founders, management roles and key personnel?
We are a small team. Jianming started to work on it part-time since Nov 2012 and became full-time in February 2013. I (Willa) collaborated with Jianming about BUTU for a few of months before I quit my job around end of March this year and joined him as a full-time co-founder.
Jianming’s past experiences are mainly in SoLoMo space with solid Engineering Management background in a couple of prestigious startups. While I was dedicated to product marketing and contract negotiation inside a large scale Hi-Tech company where I understand that side of the business.
Jianming is BUTU’s tech lead, I am primarily taking care of the content, user engagement and potential partnership. It is hard to split the job between two of us, we can be very flexible on different tasks, and learn from each other.
Estimation of market size?
We decide to focus on English-Speaking market first. As in 2011, the value of the US online travel market is higher than that of Great Britain, China, India and Brazil combined. It will continue to take the leading position in the coming years.
For US 2012, there are 1.5B+ domestic leisure trips, 66.6M inbound travelers and 25.5M outbound travelers. Another way to estimate the market is to look at the traffic of some travel media websites, Tripadvisor (leading Travel Media Company) 2013 has over 60M unique visitors monthly and over 20M registered users. Gogobot (one hyped travel media startup) also claimed BUTU has 200K visitors monthly.
For other traditionally non-English speaking markets, e.g., China, the target users of online travel planning usually read/speak English good enough to be ready for international travels. These users will not be restricted by languages based on our survey back home.
I’d like to mention one more thing, before we released our basic trip report publish tool, we talked to over 200 publishers, asked them whether they were interested to let us convert their travelogues to BUTU style, 35% said YES. This number is much higher than our expectation!
After the publish tool unveiled, we talked to 70-80 friends or strangers, 70% respondents adapted to the tool quickly and started to publish their new or existing travel stories in a fresh new way.
Competition?
We focus on a niche market and avoid head-to-head competing with industry incumbents for the high-margin segments. Free of legacy and faster product iteration will be any startup’s initial advantages.
We have both direct and potential competitors. While each of them, including BUTU, is having different focus on the product features.
Direct competitors:
1) Travel blogs: blogs don’t have structured POI. They are all scattered around on the internet. Comparing to each individual travel blog site, we have more comprehensive content and easier navigation by region, place, user, category etc. Comparing to travel blogging site (e.g. Travelpod): We focus on being a utility than just sharing. We structure blogs to be easily reusable. Overall, travel blogs are great for inspiration, but not so easy to be reapplied.
2) Travel Forums: forum is not SEO friendly in general. The content including trip reports is difficult to be discovered.
3) Tripadvisor: their travel guide service is hidden deeply by its review and meta-search feature. The site is cluttered and their publish tool sucks. Most of their trip reports are in the forum, a highly guarded and unfriendly community.
4) Yahoo Travel: it is the closest one in terms of leveraging guides to incite planning, but they suffer from outdated infrastructure. Not sure anyone is using Yahoo Travel. I personally don’t use any Yahoo service.
5) Travel Guides (Lonely Planet, Rough Guides etc.): they are not free and their guides update quite slowly. Though people like authoritative travel information, people are also open for opinions from trusted social connections or even ordinary travelers if they share similar preference or constraints. In addition, most of guides lacks of coverage of those long tail local attractions or hidden gems.
Potentially, Google will join the party. Though we doubt that any time soon because they are focusing on meta-search and competing with OTAs now. Even if they do, we will compete with better product, faster iteration and more clear and focused consumer service.
Revenue model and strategy for profitability?
We believe content shall be free. We will make money either from service or tools we provide via membership (like TripIt) or getting commission from downstream booking service. With enough traffic, we can potentially try advertisement.
By learning user's intention based on the content they read, there is room for more accurate advertisement targeting for tours, flights or hotels. We combined selective flash deals with trip reports for some top destinations, and we already got small revenue in via lead generation.
What problem does the business solve?
People will have less and less time to consume more and more data. Consumer will have shorter decision cycle but higher expectation. So the next battlefield is user data and personalization (context-aware). The travel industry is heavily disjointed. The winner will be the one who can connect the dots around user’s context and make their life easier.
Tons of good quality travel blogs and travel posts scattered around the internet are the gold mine to explore. Blogs have themes, subjects, stories along with the information of authors. They can provide a foundation for traveler profile matching.
BUTU reshapes these inspirational sources to be easily reused. For instance, you might want to combine great content from multiple blogs, or you might want to know the location of each place mentioned in a trip report quickly and directly. BUTU completes those tasks for you, save your time and energy.
How did the initial idea evolve and were there changes/any pivots along the way in the early stages?
We built an attraction focused POI database, mining their relationship. With that as a foundation, we created a mobile app to do on-road context-aware recommendation and a dashboard for pre-trip planning. Later, we found people have very complicated needs during trip planning stage, but everyone loves to read trip reports, this is always the most popular section on the website/forum. So we start to focus on offering users a great platform to share and reuse visualized trip reports.
That said, our dashboard is still the most popular feature. We noticed many returning users using it for more than 45 minutes on average.
Why should people or companies use the business?
We aim to make travel information more concise and relevant to travelers. In the end, it is the content and user experience that will make difference. How to organize information and make them relevant, ubiquitously accessible and easy to digest will be the key differentiators.
There are two types of users. For content consumers, they are looking for “actionable” trip reports. They come because we have the best and most comprehensive travel stories (San Francisco is the 1st city we gather more than 100 high quality trip reports with different styles for filter). For content producers, they could be amateur bloggers who need more publicity, or ordinary travelers (including those active members in travel forums) who are getting lazy to share stories because there is no satisfying tool out there.
What is the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition (apart from PR)?
Reaching out Tnooz is part of our strategy :-). Given our current resource, we will stay nimble and leverage any free channels possible. For example, we are focusing on SEO/SMO for some special segment to attract traffics. It will take time but be valuable for our long term organic growth. Approach existing bloggers is another important channel for us to acquire content and users.
More importantly, we are exploring ways to unlock the sharing desire of ordinary travelers to share their authentic experience (in the format of trip reports) through our system.
Besides, we also promote our service on social media and various travel groups; we do cross promotion with community on Quora, Facebook, Reddit and other travel forums. We also hit some offline meet-ups and even distribute BUTU’s logo T-Shirts.
Where do you see the company in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
Hope we are still alive and go strong. We would like to build up a sharing community among travelers and potentially locals for exploring experiences. Our first challenge will be gathering enough high quality trip reports and attracting more contributors.
Content quality control and service availability on mobile platform will be vital for us. Above all, finding product-market fit and acquiring significant number of users will be the biggest challenge if we can cross the startup chasm.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
The planning demands varies from person to person, one size will not fit all. So one stop site will not work. People will compare service to service anyway. However, people always look for efficiency and personalized experiences. So if we can create something allow them to explore the destination using less time or effort, they might use it in their decision process. So our goal is to make us a viable option in the whole travel lifecycle. If they will visit X number of sites during that decision flow, we want to be one of these sites.
What other technology company would you consider yourselves most closely aligned to in terms of culture and style... and why?
We started this venture in a very similar way how TripAdvisor started and went through some similar early challenges. But in term of culture and style, we take Google as our role model: fundamental, innovative, bold and benevolent.
Tnooz view:
It's the conventional wisdom in travel trade circles that social travel apps like BUTU breed like mosquitoes and die just as quickly.
While cynicism is easy, the circumstances that drove observers to be cynical of the category can change.
BUTU has a mobile-first mindset and was born in a mobile-first era. Those are two advantages that Dopplr lacked.
It's striking how in 2013 the largest social network, Facebook, has plateaued, while tiny, task-focussed mobile apps, like Snapchat, have nipped away at its functionality and gained real traction.
If travelers are going to spend a large chunk of their time on apps on their phone, it's possible that the social travel app category that failed during the open Web (desktop browser) era may thrive in an era of the mobile web and the Internet of Things.
If HotelTonight and Airbnb can nip at Expedia's heels, why can't a social travel, trip-planning platform -- if it's well executed?
That said, it's worrisome that BUTU's founders seem to think they can make money by providing tools via membership (like TripIt) or getting commission from downstream booking service. This is a red flag because they haven't revealed what killer functionality BUTU has that TripIt, WorldMate, Gogobot, and other social trip-planning app competitors lack.
Is the leisure market of travelers large enough that BUTU can take 1% and then convert 1% of that subset into paying customers and cover its costs?
Tnooz suspects that the key test is less whether BUTU has "innovative" ideas than about whether the company ever targets a pain point that consumers truly care about, the way Instagram and Evernote did.
We also worry whether the team can be focused on iterating quickly on only top priority issues, or if it'll get sidetracked or will dilute its energies -- something that only time will tell. On paper, at least, the team looks solid.
Bottom line: We're hoping the best for BUTU.
YouTube video explaining BUTU: