NOV 9 - Summery

SUMMERY

•The company name : Travel Companion

•Names of the team members :

     Chistian Pummerer

     Paul Mougin

     Dong Xu

•Superhero powers for each team member 

Superhero Powers

•3 to 5 problems worth solving for each team member 

Problems worth solving

•Pictures and descriptions of the research into your ideas 

New concept

•Analysis of analogs, antilogs and leaps of faith. 

Evaluation of the new concept

•First Startup Dashboard with main leaps of faith and how you'll test them. 

•List of interview questions. Make sure you follow the Mom Test, and that you are trying to test your main leaps of faith!

Dashboard and Questions for interview

•Get out of the building! Analysis of 5-10 problem interviews with potential customers. Include stories from the customers. 

•Analysis of potential solutions + idea evaluation worksheet (Old Concept)

Solution Evaluation

•First business model canvas (check)

Old Canvas

New Canvas

StartUp Dashboard + Questions for Interviews + Solutions evaluation

NOV 8 - New Canvas

New Canvas for the Local Companion

NOV 8 - EVALUATION OF NEW CONCEPT

Our idea has undergone continuous changes over the course of the project. Evaluation and analysis of problems and ideas at the early stages had been aggravated due to the fact, that we were not yet able to pin the problem down precisely. Especially it was difficult to develop a clear understanding of market segments, potential customers and external environment, since different parts of the problems had different relevancy to potential user groups and were currently solved in various ways by these potential customers. 

With the new concept that was introduced in our last post, we believe to have made good progress. By focussing one key problem we were able to get a better understanding of potential customer segments as well as their pains and needs. 

Our proposed solution takes into accounts many of the learnings that we got through research and feedback on earlier stages of the project. However, as there are several innovative aspects to the idea, it is obvious that they also include new leaps of face and aspects that have not been evaluated. 

In the following you will therefore find an overview of the current results and a listing of necessary next steps to get a clearer understanding of viability and feasibility of our idea.

Business Model Canvas 

The Business Model Canvas focusses on three main user groups: Local providers, Travelers and Hotels/B&Bs. More parties could be added but it would increase complexity unnecessarily and make the chart difficult to read.

Main leaps of faith are the following:


Local Providers (that are not professional tourist guides) :

• are wanting and willing to offer activities for tourists
• are willing to do that for a cover charge that is being perceived as reasonable by travelers
• do not rely on a steady income, because there is uncertainty about how often an offer is requested
• enjoy meeting "unknown" internationals and sharing time with them
• are flexible enough to also provide these activities on call
• will interact with a platform to respond on bookings on time
• will regularly check if there are requests that they can fulfill

Analogs:

• There are homepages by individuals that offer the exact kind of activities that we would be offering --> they might use the platform instead of programming their own site: barcelonaslowtravel.com/, thebackpacktraveller.com 
• some people already interact on Couchsurfing --> what if they could make money by offering a similar service
• comparable offers have evolved in other big cities  and other regions of the world (New York, Asia)
• AirBnB is currently launching a local concierge service: AirBnB Local concierge
• Interaction on AirBnB is similar to the required interaction with our platform

Antilogs:

• Right now e.g. students work other jobs such as waiters
• Existing sites do not focus only on local offers but include commercial offers: trip4real.com

Travelers

• do not only want to go to local places, but enjoy them together with a local
• are looking for a more authentic travel experience
• are willing to pay money to do that
• see extra value over e.g. homepages like MeetUp since these are for free
• would use the platform to post requests if they wanted to do something in particular
• will use the internet to look for activities

Analogs:

• tourists pay a LOT for commercial tours and touristic activities
• there are different blogs that will recommend local restaurants - there is apparently interest in local experiences: Tripobox
• already use homepages like: eatwith.com

Antilogs

• many people simply go to the tourist information office

Hotels and Bed&Breakfasts

• are wanting to help their guests find alternative activities (they might want to earn commissions on recommending commercial services)

Analogs

• especially family owned bed&breakfasts like giving advice to their clients and maintaining a good relationship
• in Hostels they provide flyers for all different kinds of offers

Antilogs

• Hotels oftentimes have contracts with restaurants and earn commissions 

While these leaps of faith, analogs and antilogs are yet unclear it is possible to find more information through research and interviews. The foundation will be the StartUp Dashboard and Interview Guide.

NOV 6 - Outcome from the team meeting

Today, all team members of the group met in the afternoon, to discuss the about the feedbacks given by the previous session.

We all came out with new ideas to solve the problem and doubts. We did some changes on our project, because we felt that the old idea was too "weak" for the market, and not innovative enough.

So, our new aim is:

"A market place for local experiences for visitors."





The idea is creating a platform where local people can share their skills with visitors.

- Local people who want to earn some extra money, and also social contact, and they have really interesting local experience to share with others, they are interested to find someone willing to pay for their service, or showing the experience.

- Visitors, on the other hand,  who does not want to have a tipical experience of visiting a place, and going into tourist traps, they can go on this platform and find the alternative experiences; meeting local contacts and social contact are also a big issue here; and also finding opportunities for new experience that as a regular visitor of the town would not have enjoyed.

We are still developing the idea, so keep yourself tuned !

NOV 6 - FEEDBACK SESSION

Todays lessen, all teams were given the opportunity to pitch their ideas to members of other project teams and receive feedback. It was also a good way to test, how well the story that we were telling explained the problem we were trying to solve, and if our suggested solution would be perceived as reasonable and viable.

After internal team discussions, some more research and the guided idea finding process within the lectures, our team was able to narrow down the possible solutions we wanted to focus on:

A service for travelers in a foreign environment, that gave them instant access to personalized and first hand local advice and would assist in situations were e.g. foreign language skills or local knowledge is needed. 

The pitch we gave was based on the following concept:

Do you travel a lot? Yes? Thats great, we do too. So in this case, you certainly know how big of a difference it makes, if you visit a place were a friend of yours is living. He or she will give you advice on what to or what not to do and will guide you to the interesting sites, restaurants, clubs and places that are not as touristy and expensive. Instead you are getting a much more authentic experience, are more relaxed because you don't have to spend hours on researching good locations and in case something happens, or if you get lost you always know who to turn to, right? Well...  this is something a lot of travelers highly appreciate - but most of them do not have. A lot of tourists in barcelona for example complain a lot, how they end up paying horrendous prices in touristy restaurants, how its difficult to find out what places are actually worth visiting and how they find them selves staying at places with only other tourists and not a single spanish person. Also, they might get in tricky situations if they have an emergency in some sort, because many things like police stations or hospitals work differently then in their home countries. With an additional language barrier it easily turns into a very stressful experience. This is the problem we want to solve! We want to provide tourists the information and assistance, they would usually get if they personally knew somebody in town. We want to be their Local Companion. 

The core assets for this kind of service is good knowledge of the local environment as well as language skills. But also a good understanding of customers interests to be able to make suggestions for places and activities that both locals and the visitor will enjoy. Also, the answers would have to be available the moment that questions arise and visitors would have to feel comfortable about asking these questions when needed. 

The service that we had in mind would consist of two parts: (1) a get to know meeting between a local guide and the visitor and (2) the possibility to contact the guide e.g. via phone or WhatsApp to ask for advice or assistance. Additional services could include a smartphone for rent, so the visitor does not have to worry about high telephone charges abroad. And the experience could be enhanced through providing an application that already includes some sort of recommendations but also facilitates the communication with the guide. Income would be generated directly from the customers through e.g. a one time charge. 

The main feedback we got was the following:

• the idea of the problem was understood in general but people did not immediately see its application or a personal need
• there were questions about the way of communication and e.g. privacy and security issues if the two parties would have to leave personal contact information
• it was pointed out that a good match of interests and personality between the local and the traveler was essential
• the biggest question seamed to be about the customers willingness to pay and if the on demand assistance was actually doable and helpful
• the additional value of a person that was continuously available by a simple call was doubted
• it was pointed out that scalability was very difficult because the current concept required staff at the actual location. 

These questions were all very legitimate and we started thinking about options how to adapt our idea in a way that the concept would be focussed more on the essential needs and allowed for more scalability. 

NOV 4 - BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS WORKSHOP

Analyze your business model canvas (in your blog) for the 4 major risks: market, people, technology, and financial:

• Market (what is the market need? What are the customer segments you are targeting? What is your value proposition for each segment? How is this better than what competitors currently offer?)
• People (Who is on your team? Who are your advisors and investors? Who are your main partners? Show that you have all of the skills necessary to be successful. For any key expertise which you don’t have on your core team, you’ve found partners, advisors, or contractors who have this expertise)
• Technology (What existing technologies will you use? What technologies will you need to develop? Will you manage the technology in-house, or will you outsource it? What competing technologies exist and what is your advantage over them?)
• Financial (What are your main sources of revenue? What are your primary costs? How will you acquire customers? When do you expect to reach breakeven/profitability?)

OCT 28 - THE BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS

Tasks

• First Startup Dashboard with main leaps of faith and how you'll test them.
• List of interview questions. Make sure you follow the Mom Test, and that you are trying to test your main leaps of faith!
• Get out of the building! Analysis of 5-10 problem interviews with potential customers. Include stories from the customers.
• An analysis of each of the different solutions which were proposed in the Startup Lab workshop. Which is/are the most promising based on our doability selection criteria (solves the problem, technically feasible, financially viable, scalable, large target market or profitable niche, results in defensible competitive advantage)? Include the idea evaluation worksheet, and a detailed analysis of the ideas.

OCT 20 - STARTUP LAB ON PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

The startup lab was our opportunity to present our ideas to other students with a different academic background. The session was basically split in two parts:

1. each team member was individually presenting the idea to another student to receive feedback.
2. afterwards the original teams got together to discuss the results.

As discussed in the last post the problem we had identified was, that tourists lack sufficient local information about the cities they travel. They would like to have a more authentic experience, avoid tourist traps and know in advance, what places (except the obvious tourist attractions) are worth visiting. Also they are interested in what has to be kept in mind in terms of buying tickets and where to grasp a glance of the cultural spanish life in the city. 

An analog that pictures the situation very well, would be your enhanced experience if you have a friend in town, that knows (1) you and (2) the city and who can give you advice, help you out if you need assistance with anything and can give you advice what is important to consider when exploring the city. 

The problem seamed "plausible" to our feedback partner - a spanish media engineering student. 
He agreed, that it is difficult to get relevant insights to touristic locations but also acknowledged that with the wide range of services that was already being offered to tourists it would be difficult to make it a profitable business model. The following crucial aspects were pointed out:

• price matters: how much would customers be willing to pay for what kind of service?
• the service would have to be independent - so recommendations can fully focus on what fits the customer best.
• this however stands in conflict to revenue generation from commissions
• also, it would be essential to know the customer very well to make good suggestions (not everybody likes the same things)
• it is less about finding options: basically all sites and locations are online and rated in e.g. trip advisor already - so it is about finding the right ones for the particular customer

Summing up it can be said, that there is a good chance that the identified problem is being perceived by a significant user group, but that it might be very challenging to find a solution to the problem that fits different kind of customers, is different from the variety of existing services in the tourist industry and affordable at the same time. 

In talking about the possible solutions - or rather aspects of a possible solution, the following three components were suggested:

• an office or meeting point where travelers could get information on arrival
• Question: how is it different from regular tourist offices?
• What could be the immediate service that could be offered?
• an application for mobile phones that lists "authentic" locations and has an integrated rating system.
• Question: how would it be different from e.g. TripAdvisor?
• a telephone service to contact a personal guide
• a community of travelers that helped each others out and gave advice (local persons in their city give advice to travelers from other locations. In return they will be receiving advice once the travel themselves)
• Question: how is it different from e.g. couch surfing?

These suggestions certainly contribute to a better understanding of possible solutions to this problem. It is certainly true that many sources of information is available already. In fact, people traveling via couch surfing might already have a valid solution through the contact to their hosts - similar to people that have acquaintances in the city they travel. Our task would therefore be to find a solution for those who do not have access yet such as people, that do not like couch surfing and do not want to approach foreign people, but that would be willing to pay more to get an authentic experience even though they are staying in for example a hotel.

Problem Description

Suggested Solutions

OCT 14 - OBSERVATION PRESENTATIONS

Summarize your observations – how many places observed, when, number of interviews, etc.


In order to find potential customer segments, we were trying to identify scenarios, in which communication difficulties would pose a major pain to a significant group of users. As discussed in the last post, we were trying to make out situations, where communication difficulties would not only bother a lot of people to a small extend. Instead we were looking for situations that would make a rather narrow group of people actively search for a solutions even if they had to pay money for it. Three things that came to our minds were pharmacies, hospitals and the police stations.

To obtain objective information from the interviews and get authentic answers we prepared the following lead questions:

• how many of your clients do not speak spanish? (--> are there potential customers at all?)
• do they have trouble communicating? (--> do they have the problem that we would expect?)
• if so, where are they from? Age group? Patterns? (--> detailed information?)
• if so, how do they solve the problem? (--> is there an existing satisfactory solution?)
• is there anything else that causes trouble in this context? (--> are there other potential problems worth solving?)

To not distort the results, we told our interview partners that we were taking a survey on the life of foreigners in the city and did not reveal the actual scope of the interview. 

Pharmacies
Pharmacies were our first target so we conducted 12 interviews in pharmacies within different parts of the city. Mostly communication was not perceived as a problem. Basically all pharmacies said that they had at least one english speaking staff member at all times and that most clients from other countries had sufficient knowledge of english to get along. Also, there were several other possible solutions: Many clients already knew the exact name of the medication they wanted to buy and at times, foreigners would bring somebody with good english or spanish knowledge to assist the process. 

--> As a consequence, we decided that in this context the pain was not big enough for people to look for alternative solutions.

Police Station
Our second guess was that many people would have to go to the police station to report theft or other incidents. So we inquired how these situations were handled at the police station. Although in fact many international tourists would report to the police, communication did not seam to be a big problem. Again, staff had good knowledge of english and for more severe cases there were professional interpreters available. --> The police in Barcelona did therefore already solve the problem in a professional way.

Hospital
In the hospital the results were different: We visited two hospitals (... , ...) and although some staff members had an respectable knowledge of english, they told us that it was at times difficult to communicate with all clients. They told us that especially in public hospitals this was the case. For this reason they sometimes recommended clients to approach private international doctors centers that were better equipped to assist non spanish speaking clients. 

Foreigners Office (Oficina de Extranjería) 
The foreigners office was one of the locations were the lack of sufficient communication was apparent. Staff did not know or even purposefully refuse to speak english. Several of the waiting foreigners we talked to were frustrated by the whole process because it made it very difficult for non spanish speakers. This was confirmed by several people (6 persons) with different cultural background. The majority of the persons in the waiting room were either students on an exchange program (european and non european) or people in their 30ties that had found work in Barcelona. 


Since we had not yet received clear results and were not able to identify a deep pain in a certain context, we decided to be more open to other possible problems in the framework of international traveling and communications. For this reason we decided to look for insights that tourists directly or hotel staff could give us. Our assumption hereby was that many tourists would turn to the reception desk in a hotel if they had a problem with communication that they would not be able to solve by themselves.

Hotels
Answers in hotels we went to were very similar: We learned that most guests had a sufficient knowledge of english and only few visitors would have trouble communicating. As could be expected, the customer groups that had a hard time with speaking any foreign language were either middle aged and elderly asian people (especially china) and elderly from different countries in Europe. Besides checking in and out, they would ask about tourist information, tour offerings but also advice for restaurants, evening entertainment or things such as cleaning services.

Tourists
In talking to tourists directly many of the previously retrieved information were being confirmed. Communication was mostly not considered a big problem. Even by e.g. elderly german people that spoke only little english. However being asked what could have been improved during their stay, several people independently pointed out that they had ended up going to tourists attractions and having to wait for several hours before they were let in. This was because they did not know that tickets had to be reserved online to enter at a particular time. Also they said that they felt like many restaurants would charge inappropriate prices or would try to actually charge more then what had been ordered. It was mostly not the lack of opportunities that they considered as inconvenient but the fact that it was not easy to know which of the places were actually worth the money and an authentic experience and which were just a tourist rip off. 

Very good insights were given from travelers staying with host families, couch surfing or Air BnB. They pointed out, that many of the locations they went to had been recommended by their hosts and that they would e.g. discuss their plans with their hosts to get local insights and recommendations. They also seamed to be less frustrated then tourists who did not have the opportunity to get this kind of information. 



This led us to the result, that translation and interpretation might be a problem that many tourists might have to deal with - but one that most of them are able to master to a certain extend. At the same time it became apparent, that many tourists are not completely happy with their experience abroad because they feel like an anonymous tourist with little authentic experience or because they lack information on what is worth spending time and money.

The observations had helped us understand our potential customers better but also forced us to over thing our current concept. Since we were not able to narrow the concept down to a very precise problem it was difficult to develop an elaborate costumer journey or a strategy canvas for our industry. 

Link: Observations Presentation 

SEP 30 - INITIAL IDEA PRESENTATIONS

After our group had discussed several problems that would be worth solving (see post: Ideas and the selection process), we agreed, that the tourist sector would potentially be a good field to start digging deeper.

We saw it as a good opportunity to make use of the international background and language skills represented in our team (English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese). Living in a city famous for its trourist-industry and having good contacts to travelers would also allow us to test ideas easily and get in contact with potential customers. 

More details on the first stage of idea generation can be found in the presentation (see link below), covering the following key questions.

5 minute presentations

• Identify your team of 3-5
• Name of industry
• What is the job that needs to be done?
• What is your hypothesis of the problem(s)?
• What are they doing now to solve their problems/desires?
• Are they happy with the solutions?
• What’s missing?

In addition to the information that can be found in the presentation, there were several useful comments and feedback in the class discussion after the presentation:

Industry: Tourism certainly does span the whole city of Barcelona and access to potential customers is most likely easy - however it is also a highly competitive environment due to the variety of related existing services and products. 

Job to be done: As stated in the presentation, from a Start-Up perspective the job that would need to be done (referring to the problem) is to make travelers feel more secure and provide them an easy way of communication in a foreign environment. However the "job that needs to be done by the customer" would be: communicating in a foreign environment, without knowing very well the respective language and dealing with unfamiliar situations, not understanding the cultural environment. 

Customers: The described problem highly depends on the customer segment our start-up would be focussing on. This would include age, cultural background, language fluency, travel experience, etc.

Whats missing: The gap that we identified was still very broad at this point - also there was a risk on focussing to much on a shallow problem that many people might have, but not enough customers would be willing to pay for. Our task was therefore to start looking for scenarios where this problem would evolve and be a serious pain for a certain customer segment. 

Link: Initial Idea Presentation