TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring US-based mobile-led audio tour system Geotrio.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
Geotrio is a media company. We developed a platform for the creating and taking of any kind of GPS-based, audio tour, anywhere in the world, in any language and theme.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
We raised about 100K from friends and family and boot-straddled to develop our products.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Human-led guided tours have many limitations: they are costly, the guest cannot take them at his or her convenience or control the pace.
Describe the business, core products and services?
Geotrio developed four iPhone apps, one for recording a rich-media tour and three for taking them (one universal app for taking tours anywhere in the world, one for San Francisco and one for New York City).
In addition tours can be created, viewed, and shared from our website at www.geotrio.com. We also created a Facebook game, Mystery Tours, where players compete against each other to solve a mystery tour based on audio hints.
Geotrio has also a lot of experience in producing tours and creating content for our partners.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
We have a few:
- Universities and colleges that use our platform to create campus tours and offer them to prospective students and visitors to showcase their academic institution.
- Top-notch hotels that want to offer tours for their guests that start at the hotel entrance, display the hotel, and enhance customer loyalty.
- Convention Centers who can offer conference organizers another service to offer conference attendees.
We also have some other partners such as Bike and Roll, that uses Geotrio’s technology to offer self-guided biking tours to individuals renting their bikes.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
We didn’t receive and external investment yet.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
Charge academic institutions and hotels an annual licensing fee to offer tours to their guests, and revenue-share with convention centers the profits received from "selling" the tours to conference organizers.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strength:
- Powerful products: we make it easy to create tours and fun to take them. Tours can be created in 6-8 hours.
Weaknesses:
- This is a niche market and its unlikely Geotrio will become a multi-billion dollar company.
Opportunities:
- To get a hold of the many academic institutions who would like to use cutting-edge technologies to showcase their campus for a midest fee (we charge about $2,000 a year from them) and convention centers who can user Geotrio’s technology to generate more revenue.
Threats:
- Competition and the limited budgets of many institutions.
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?Too many people to mention. We are stubborn.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
Having 200 quality tours all over America and revenues exceeding $600K.
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.