TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring Sweden-based location service for tracking travel experiences, Globified.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
We are Viktor, a 23 year old designer, and Patrik, a 29 year old developer from Stockholm, Sweden.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
None. This is the part where we're struggling at the moment.
We would love to run a profitable non-funded business, but since we both have bills (and a lot of them!), and full-time jobs, it's impossible to work with Globified full-time, which unfortunately affects our development and progress speed.
What problem are you trying to solve?
We're trying to solve two key problems. The first is problem is what service you're going to use if you're out on a journey and want to document it. It might be with pictures or with text, for yourself or for your friends.
This service did not exist. This was however the initial direction we were aiming for when developing Globified v.1.
During the process we have discovered another huge hole in this segment. We want to invent a user-generated guidebook, that when members on a trip checks in at a city, a spot is created for that city.
This spot will keep growing with user-generated when members check in, upload photos, text, or are writing tips about this city. We believe this can be a huge USP for us, but it all depends on the numbers of (active) members we can achieve.
Describe the business, core products and services?
I think i might have covered this with my last answer. :)
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
Backpackers. They travel a lot, and often for a long time. These members will create memorable and interesting travel diaries which can help inspire other potential members.
Backpackers are not a bunch of hippies anymore, i think hipsters are the new backpackers nowadays, and hipsters like the internet, right?! Our challenge here is to reach out to this crowd, and make 'em spread it to their backpacker friends.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
We got the initial idea after me and my brother's trip to central america a few years ago. We have had a custom blog made with a blog feed and an interactive map to follow us.
Friends later asked us what service we used for this trip when they we're about to go travel, and we realized this is a service that had to go public.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
We've discussed this over and over. After the beta is over we will release a freemium model. Boring, huh? I think this is the way to go, though.
If you choose a free account, you'll be able to document your journey with all the basic features, but with a pro account it will be quite a bit better. We have other revenue ideas as well, but we plan to keep those secret until launch time.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- We are a kickass team. It's my brother (the developer) and I who are building this product. We know each other inside and out, and we both know our stuff. We also firmly believe in this service and it's potential.
Weaknesses:
- No external funding. This is both a strength and a weakness, but as I said in the beginning; not being able to work with Globified full-time slows us down.
Opportunities:
- Endless. I seriously believe this can be huge. If we're not reaching out to people who care about documenting their trips, we might attract them to our user-generated guidebook, which might very well turn out to be the most profitable part of our service.
Threats:
- If we're not thinking about other services similar to ours like competitors (since i simply don't see any as a threat today), our biggest competitors are Facebook and blogging services. We have to show people why to use Globified to document their journey instead of just blogging or Facebooking about it. This a big challenge we're facing since our target audience pretty much uses Facebook for everything. This is also why it'll be so important to connect social services like Facebook to Globified in many ways so our members don't have to double publish anything on different networks.
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?Actually, we haven't heard that at all. Everyone's been very positive so far. Right now, we'd just like to get more members and for them to provide more feedback to us so we can continue to make this service as good as possible.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
We would like to create a well-known service which is profitable enough to make a living of for us two, which would make it possible to work with Globified full-time. When we're at this point, we'll settle some higher goals. One step at the time.
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.