TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring Spain-based city guide publishing service Urban Digger.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
Urban Digger is a recommendation engine and self-publication platform for city guides. It provides an open market for writers with credible reputations to create, publish and sell city guides and an opportunity for travellers to purchase guides or create their own.
The founders are Sarah Taylor and Chris Gifford, originally both architects from the UK but with an obsession for travel. We set about creating Urban Digger after spotting the need for a platform that connects people with extensive knowledge of city destinations to those seeking more authentic, under-the-skin experiences.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
The business has been self-funded with a large amount of personal investment from us and some additional support from UK government grants. As Urban Digger is pre-launch, we are currently open to offers of investment to drive the business forward.
What problem are you trying to solve?
As the market for online city guides becomes more saturated, we feel travellers are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the quality of content available and the time it takes to navigate through website after website in search of information that will deliver the most authentic travel experience possible.
Many people are willing to pay for content from credible sources if it can save them time and provide a more relevant and personal guide to their destination.
There’s also an increasing number of travel writers experiencing a decline in both pay and commissions from traditional publishing outlets and looking for new sources of income. We hope that Urban Digger will unite both travellers and travel writers in a way that can be beneficial all round.
Describe the business, core products and services?
Urban Digger has a strong community focus with bespoke features for creating and publishing guides, adding recommendations for cities that members live in or have visited and interacting with other members.
Focussed on providing inspirational city information, users are able to search content on Urban Digger based around experiences such as eco, romance, tech or gastronomy. Members can search for information generated by other members in the same creative fields, by specific locations or by the reputation they have earned through their overall contribution to the website.
Urban Digger offers travellers the opportunity to purchase guides from credible travel writers, and create their own private guides, free of charge, from the recommendations available.
It offers the writers a platform through which they can use their wealth of knowledge to easily create, publish and sell guides to generate an income where they set their own prices for their work.
The reputation system ensures that only certain members are able to publish guides, maintaining a level of trust and credibility within the community and to ensure there is added value in the guides that other members will purchase.
There is also a complex and unique verification algorithm that works in the background, ensuring that recommendations cannot be gamed and those places that become verified do so as a genuine act of the community, helping travellers to make accurate and informed decisions based on the knowledge of locals.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
The majority of our beta members will be travel writers and content creators who are willing to help generate recommendations, create and publish guides and test the platform to make sure it is watertight prior to a public launch.
Urban Digger is primarily aimed towards a market of "creative thinkers" - those that are involved in creative fields including artists, architects, writers, photographers and so on.
From our research, we understand that this sector, by its nature, consists of highly inquisitive travellers when it comes to research and decision making. In general, this audience generate the most authentic and valuable content, travel several times per year and have a greater disposable income.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
We carried out a substantial amount of market research prior to and during the initial development phase in approximately thirty European cities, speaking to DMOs, travel writers and independent travellers.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
Urban Digger is a free service for both members and non-members. There are a number of revenue channels that will come into effect as various milestones are met in line with the growth of traffic and content, however our initial focus will be on driving sales of city guides and partnership opportunities.
We also aim to develop strategic brand partnerships within vertical markets offering city and site sponsorship packages and are currently working with DMOs for marketing assistance and driving ground-level exposure.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- Quality of information against quantity; easily searchable and relevant.
- Crowd-sourced city model providing limitless, organic growth potential.
- The ability to react to market demand and innovate quickly; small team with a big, international focus.
- Attractive, simple and enjoyable user experience that is both functional and relevant.
Weaknesses:
- As a self-funded business, we have limited resources and would like to build our team.
Opportunities:
- Ability to attract credible partners and contributors by offering something new and exciting.
- Timely proposition. There is a growth in the audience of travellers who are willing to pay for content and in the number of writers looking for new opportunities to monetise their knowledge and skills.
- Potential to expand into fast growing markets including mobile and location based services.
Threats:
- Building brand awareness in a crowded market.
- Competitors with deep pockets.
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?The feedback we have received so far has generally been very positive in nature and we have an exceptionally supportive network of mentors, advisors and fellow entrepreneurs around us.
As with every startup, we have had to endure a handful of naysayers along the way but that only encourages us to work harder and prove them wrong. We even had a bank manager once who told us “there is no future for online businesses”.
Needless to say, we found ourselves a new bank.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
Our focus over the coming year is growth, growth and more growth - to build traffic, increase content and the number of live cities, grow our team and create credible partnerships.
We’d be delighted if Urban Digger is adopted by a wealth of travel writers frequently using the platform to publish their guides, and travellers who are gaining real value from the website’s offering.
We also hope to have made some headway in terms of successfully penetrating the online travel publishing market and expanding into the mobile space.
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.