TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring US-based tours and activity itineraries platform UnAnchor.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
We are UnAnchor, a marketplace of self-guided tour itineraries. We provide a tour guide experience without the cost and hassle of hiring an actual guide.
There are two co-founders:
- Jason Demant – Primarily takes care of the business side and also blogs on LifeAfterCubes.com about travel and entrepreneurship. Jason spent most of 2010 traveling with his girlfriend throughout Asia.
- Mohammad Forouzani – Primarily takes care of the technical side, both back-end and front-end. Previously, Mohammad ran a web development consulting company.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?None. All costs (which have been minimal) have come from our own pockets.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Finding reliable information for your next vacation takes too long.
Describe the business, core products and services?
Travellers purchase self-guided tour itineraries through the site. The itineraries take the hassle out of researching the different sight and attraction options.
A local expert prioritizes the best things to do depending on how much time you have and also provides specific instructions to make it easy for you to get around. You get a local tour guide experience at your own pace without the cost and hassle of a hiring a local tour guide.
Right now, the itinerary comes in a PDF download with pictures. If someone’s technical enough they can put it on their phone.
In the future, we’ll be making it easy to download and follow your itinerary while you’re exploring the new destination on your mobile device.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
Because we’re trying to build a marketplace we have two problems to solve – the first is finding people to write itineraries and the second is finding travellers to buy the itineraries. We’ve broken up our launch into two phases.
This first phase, which we’re currently in, is primarily about finding itinerary writers. We’re talking to travel bloggers, travel-writers and people in the travel industry at this point.
We’re also trying to find purchasers for the existing itineraries. We’re trying to very accurately target travellers interested in only cities for the itineraries that we have.
We have a goal of 50 itineraries, and at that point we go into the second phase of the launch which is a more general, wider launch. We’ll then be targeting all travellers looking to plan their next vacation.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
At this point, our customer validation has been anecdotal, coming primarily from meeting other travellers during our personal travels. We’re working towards validating our idea with real customers before we begin exploring investor options.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
The revenue model is selling the tour itineraries. Itinerary writers get 75% of the revenue and UnAnchor takes the other 25%.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- Self-guided tour itineraries have never been done before – being pioneers and first-to-market should give us significant advantage over the competition.
- Solid business/technical balance between co-founders
- Subject matter expertise about travel
- Existing base of potential users due to travel blog
Weaknesses:
- First time entrepreneurs with limited networks
- Neither co-founder has significant design or mobile experience
Opportunities:
- Being able to influence a person’s day has large opportunities – from recommending hotels, and restaurants, to getting them deals on passes or admissions.
- After talking with travellers, it’s apparent that they are frustrated with the current options that are out there to plan their travels. With the ubiquity of smartphones now there is a lot of room for technology to help make this process easier.
Threats:
- Big companies such as TripAdvisor and Lonely Planet are not sitting still. They continue to improve their trip planning process.
- There are numerous start-ups addressing the same or a very similar problem as us, and each has the potential to come out with a great solution.
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?We’ve asked for feedback from many people and most have been positive. There was one blogger, whose work and opinion we highly respect, that we emailed when UnAnchor first launched.
He flat out said it didn’t seem like a viable business. He wasn’t rude about it, just blunt. It was discouraging, but at the end of the day, he’s just a focus group of one.
We know there’s a problem with travel planning and we believe there’s a viable business if we’re able to solve it. This is why we didn’t listen to him.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
UnAnchor is a business that both co-founders want to work on full-time. Currently, Jason is using his savings to sustain himself and Mohammad has a full-time job.
Our success metric is being in a financially viable position to be able to focus full time on the site. Ideally this comes from revenue, but finding investors is also an option.
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.