STARTUP STAGE: Live The World wants to be a content guide for slow travel

What is your 30-second pitch to investors? 

Live The World wants to end tedious travel planning, forever.

We find the local and authentic experiences slow travelers are craving and present them in a curated and personalized way. All of this in a fun and easy collaborative platform that saves time and energy for millennial travelers planning their own trips.

Users pay for access to ensure one gets 100% independent, trusted experiences written by locals that you can’t find on other commission-based platforms. Simply put, we are the first slow travel guide. 

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup. 

We are a digital, interactive, slow travel guide that combines consistent, trustworthy content written by locals and edited in-house with a fun and easy to use platform. 

We are the first travel guide that is aimed at slow travel, and we’re planning to expand worldwide, country by country - similar to how a traditional travel guide works. We focus on bringing the following key values to life on the platform: 

• Authentic & Slow: provide local, authentic experiences and offer more than just the touristic hot spots, addressing the rising demand of slow travel.
• Just-for-you: a curated & personalised fun user experience starting when you’ve booked your trip all the way until you are at the destination itself. 
• 100% independent: offer truly independent, trusted recommendations; we don’t take any commissions. Our users recognize all of these key values, and are willing to pay for this, via one-off payments for a destination, or a monthly full-access subscription. 

All of this is enabled by our in-house technology. We have a responsive web app that is map-based, to enable easy trip planning. We are developing personalization features based on AI technology, as well as an interactive trip planning feature on top of our map, so planning a trip becomes even more easy and fun. 

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.  

• Strengths: Local, authentic activities that cannot be easily found elsewhere; trusted, independent, consistent content thanks to zero commissions; a fun and easy user experience; personalized recommendations 
• Weaknesses: scaling content in a qualitative, consistent way is a challenge; users’ willingness to pay 
• Opportunities: Slow travel trend that is already occurring; travel picking up post-COVID 
• Threats: Incumbents could launch a similar platform and put all their existing content online 

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective? 

Live The World was born out of the frustration we had as founders with current travel planning. So much research has to be done, the available information online is of mixed quality and there is no overarching platform that makes planning user-friendly and just plain fun. 

Planning a trip takes too much time (an average person visits over 121+ websites before booking a trip and there is too much information -55% of travelers feel overwhelmed. 

Furthermore, none of that information is personalized or curated for you.

To find the hidden gems you wanted to discover you have to endlessly scroll and read through blogs - and when you actually need that information, you can’t find that blog anymore or the information is not fully correct.

Most digital online platforms are pushing commercial tours or activities that they get paid for so getting truly independent recommendations is extremely difficult. In-house surveys have revealed that the biggest pain point is finding local, authentic information that is trustworthy. We want to solve that pain point by providing this in a consistent manner for our online travel community who is willing to pay a premium for this holistic service. 

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers? 

Our go-to-market plan is going country-by-country to establish a local, loyal community of fans who will become our (paying) customers. We started in Belgium as we are based here and we have over 300+ activities live across Belgium; of which 200+ are covid-proof to ensure it is relevant in the current situation. 

We are currently expanding into two other countries and aim to cover 5+ by early 2022.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market. 

We ran several surveys with different travelers, probing for their pains and needs. Based on those responses, we could pinpoint our target audience, and how many of them are willing to pay. This in combination with a top-down estimate of inbound travelers to different regions and their travel persona type led us to our addressable and serviceable market estimates. 

We also looked at the traditional travel guide market for insights. Furthermore, our current proof-of-concept in Belgium has helped us understand our users’ needs and finetune our solution based on actual user feedback. 

How and when will you make money?

We have a pay-for-content model, what that means is that users will pay for full access to Live The World, so they are sure they get authentic & trusted information, as we don’t receive any commissions. Users will either pay a one-off fee per destination or a low monthly subscription fee for access to all destinations on our platform. 

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Joris Vanherp is an engineer, who worked as a consultant for PwC and McKinsey. Before launching Live The World, he ran an AI consulting company called Data Factory. He is in charge of the product and the operational side of the business. 

Zoë Vets is the head of marketing and content for Live The World and has more than 10 years experience in marketing, mostly in consumer marketing in e-commerce and fashion on the product side. 

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far? 

Identifying what the needs of our target audience are, and making sure our product can offer the right solution to meet those needs. 

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones? 

The winning combination of trusted, authentic content and a fun, easy-to-use interface with personalization technology is unique in the market, and will bring a lot of value to our users. 

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in? 

We will have a loyal fanbase of several thousand paying users, who each use Live The World to travel to one or more of the 5+ destinations that we cover. 

What is your end-game? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.) 

We are building a sustainable, consistent growth model whereby our platform meets and outperforms the needs of our community. Our vision is to stay private to continue to do that effectively.

However, we are open to strategic partnerships that match with our values such as a traditional travel guide publisher.