TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring US-based travel deals site with a social twist, Touristaz.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
Touristaz.com is a social travel deals site that helps travelers combine collective knowledge and buying power to make informed travel decisions and save money.
The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of budget-related travel data and a platform for processing supply-side and demand-side travel deals.
Eric Willis and Tryiokasus Brown are the co-founders.
Eric Willis is a software developer, entrepreneur, and businessman who likes to disrupt the marketplace with ideas that change the way people use the web.
His primary responsibility will be driving the company vision and assembling a passionate team to realize that vision. Speaks English, Portuguese, Spanish, and little Arabic and is passionate about online travel.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
The company is completely self-funded. We have invested a significant amount from savings and will continue to do so for the short-term.
Although we could probably raise a small round, we thought it would be more advantageous for us to keep the team small, focus on our core products, and get to launch.
Raising outside funds was not necessary to get us to that point. We plan to bootstrap unless it makes sense to raise capital.
What problem are you trying to solve?
There is a lot of noise in the daily-deal space. The main complaint about sites like Groupon and the rest of the clones is that they do not offer the types of deals that many people desire as they tend to be primarily focused on restaurant and spa deals.
We plan to solve the problem (in the travel space) by providing a demand-side solution. We will offer users the ability to express exactly the type of deal they desire, join like-minded buyers, and then aggregate their purchasing power to negotiation a group discount.
We will then supply the deal to them that best meets their requirements. We believe it will be a win-win situation for all parties.
Describe the business, core products and services?
We provide a social platform for users to receive group discounts on travel-related teals.
Touristaz aggregates like-minded travelers and connectes them with deals from property owners, tour operators and other travel -related companies.
Touristaz uses group-buying technology that aggregates deals from property owners, tour operators and travel retailers and offers them to our users at discounts of up to 90% off.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
Our key customers are savvy travelers who use the web for deals. However, we also cater to travel providers who provide the various travel-related services to our users
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
As we have not used any outside funding, that was not necessary. However, we have validated the idea with real users and real partners.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
Our business model is rather straight-forward. We deliver value through the entire chain and we will take a percentage on sales procured by our system.
Our fee may range from 10-50% percent depending on various criteria. It is a performance-based system that is risk-free for our partners.
However, it is lucrative for our company as we have very little overhead and we also take in cash before paying our partners.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- Technology - we have developed a sound platform that was built to scale.
- Partners - we have partnered with some very strong travel companies in our initial geographic market.
- Margins - we have a high margin business with great cash flow which will allow us to be very aggressive after our full launch.
Weakness:
- Marketing - as we have not attempted to raise outside funding, we will lack the initial budget to commit to a large scale advertising campaign to attract new users.
- Staff – we may be understaffed the first few months as we work on growing the userbase. This could result in missed market opportunities.
Threats:
- Our biggest threat at the start is going to be the user base. We will need to get to critical mass. These types of applications are completely dependent on the network effect in that value of a product or service increases as more people use it. So a majority of our resources will be devoted to marketing and advertising efforts to get travelers using the system.
- Also, there will be the immediate threat of more established online travel companies with large user bases encroaching on our market.
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?We did not seek out any third-party advice (beyond users and partners) on whether this could be successful or not.
We simply continued to refine the idea and attempted to remove every possible point of failure. We are comfortable with the idea of failing and not guided by the fear of it.
Many great companies failed before morphing into their current forms.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
We have set an internal goal of attracting one million registered users after one year of operations and at least a run-rate of $1 million in quarterly sales.
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.