STARTUP STAGE: Vivere uses AI to curate inspirational content

Vivere

Working with IBM Watson technology, Vivere uses artificial intelligence to easily organize and tag text and visual content about destinations around the world.

The platform is intended to create a compelling visual experience to inspire and inform travelers and to help them book experiences that match their interest.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup?

Vivere is a destination discovery platform combining exclusive content and existing data that helps travelers find the right destinations according to their preferences and helps them plan their holidays in a hassle-free manner.

In terms of technology, we benefit from IBM Watson AI that is adopted in the platform to cognitively map our content (both photos and text) in order to provide the smartest and personalized results.

What inspired you to create this company?

The lack of a solution able to purely inspire travelers and help them to discover new destinations based on their personal needs and interests. Content is crucial at these steps. The objective of all the content created for the platform is to provide a natural and fair description of the destinations.

Every OTA starts with the question, “Where do you want to go?” And leaves the inspiration and research of users to old channels or social media. We are ahead of the curve by starting a step before. We really believe that a global platform for this purpose is requested by the market today.

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

• Strengths: A team with over 20 years of experience in the travel and hospitality industry, a company as Positioner.com in the background, great UX, high-quality content production, a community on social media of over 42,000 followers.
• Weaknesses: Generating revenues with a B2C model in the inspiration segment is tough.
• Opportunities: A partnership with IBM that can strongly impact and improve our technology.
• Threats: Huge players such as Google are working to find out the way to intercept travelers in the inspiration phase. Funds are needed to develop the product and to gain traffic.

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

Help travelers that don’t know where to go on vacation and that need help to plan it. About the industry, we are actually already working with DMOs, since we have the technology and the content we license them to DMOs.

We went through hundreds of websites that are currently trying to work in the inspiration phase, and we noticed a lack in the industry.

Vivere.Travel

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

In terms of the B2B market, we of course started from the network of Positioner; about the B2C customers, organic and paid traffic will be crucial to generate a huge volume of traffic.

In the short term, we are actually glad that 20% of our traffic is coming from social media. We have a community of over 42,000 followers on Instagram that like our approach and interact with our content.

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

I would say that a deep knowledge of the industry is required. We went through hundreds of websites that are currently trying to work in the inspiration phase, and we noticed a lack in the industry. Phocuswright data and EU data helped to quantify the size of addressable market.

How and when will you make money?

The company is already generating profits out of the B2B model (DMO licenses), which allows us to sustain the business and develop the B2C platform. Our aim is to start generating a revenue stream also from the B2C model in the next 12 months.

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

The founding brothers, Daniele and Matteo Bianda, with their alchemy managed to successfully run Positioner.com for the last 20 years (a leading agency serving the best hospitality brands with digital, branding and consulting services).

The team they created around Vivere.travel is an incredible mix of competences and skills ‐ all with years of experience in the industry.

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

I would mention two parts: The first was definitely setting up a process and a network of freelancers that produce high-quality content to deeply map the destinations. The second part is related to the development of a smart algorithm that genuinely matches results.

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

We are very proud about the quality of the content and the quality of our algorithm. As soon as we start generating traction, the market will notice it.