Q: Describe the business, core products and services in one paragraph
The TripFlick app generates personalized itinerary and delivers semantically rich information about sights, based on user interests, profile and location.To provide meaningful recommendations, the context of site is also taken into consideration, such as travel route, mode of transport, opening & closing hours, time and weather conditions. The back-end recommendation engine combines advanced recommendations and hybrid multi objective genetic algorithms to build highly personalized itineraries.
Q: Who are your key customers?
Anyone who travels is our prospective customer.
Q: What business are you most likely to be compared to?
Several travel apps are marketed in different forms, however no system provides semantic recommendations specific to a tourist’s interest. If we analyse the competitive landscape, there is a lot of buzz about systems like Gogobot and Wanderfly – that essentially provides travel recommendations based on user’s social network.
Another space that is crowded by many paid and free mobile applications is occupied by Lonely Planet, TripAdvisor, Triposo, Guidepal etc. These apps are content focused and provide categorization of various places of interests. Yet another space is dominated by two key players – Tripit & Worldmate – these apps are focused on generating user friendly flight and travel itineraries.
There is an empty space in this landscape. No player exists in the area of personalization of travel information and generating context-aware smart itineraries. TripFlick does that. It is like a cocktail of Lonely Planet and Tripit with added intelligence.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve for your customers?
Travelers face a problem with overwhelming information, when they plan their trip or explore a city. Loads of irrelevant information is pushed to them which is purely based on other users ratings that leads to sparse data and recommendations. There is no system to address the problem of how to give recommendations to mobile users that go beyond simple predefined lists of interesting sites near-by.
TripFlick personalizes all the information and makes it relevant to a specific user.
Q: What financial support did you have to launch the business?
Self-funded and MDA (Media Development Authority) grant
Q: Who validated the idea first – investors or customers?
Customers validated this idea. We did a global survey and 125 people responded in favour of TripFlick
Q: What is the revenue model and strategy for profitability?TripFlick will be a paid app. TripFlick travel guide can be downloaded from Google Play at U$3.99 per city. (For the launch, the TripFlick app for Singapore is free for a limited duration.)
Q: What is the market opportunity? How scalable is this business?
We are targeting 400 million travelers visiting 100 top visited cities in the world
Q: Competitive analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
Q: Who are the team members and advisors?
Core team includes:
Nishant Johri – Founder & CEO – Nishant comes from a business development and management background with 14 years’ experience. Nishant has spearheaded market entry for various companies and introduced new technology products in Asia, Australia, China & India. His last position was with NTT Data subsidiary in Australia as Country Manager.
Shreeniwas Iyer – CTO – Shreeni is an IIT Post Graduate and comes with over 8 years’ experience in building Internet & Social Media products. He was involved in conceiving products in start-ups to leading technical teams in large organizations like Yahoo.
Q: Why do you think you are the best people to make this vision happen?
We are a team of talented, young professionals extremely passionate about changing the way people travel.
Q: What’s the motivation behind doing this?
Nishant traveled extensively and has covered over half-a-million kilometers in the last two years. Nishant hated spending hours on internet to plan his leisure trips and sought recommendation from friends, which sometimes were not of his interest. When on business travel, Nishant was not left with enough energy to google “what to do” in the evenings, after his meetings. He wished that someone could plan his evenings and just tell him what to do as per his interests, what is nearby and opened at this hour. No mobile or web application was able to help. Nishant’s woes during his extensive travel motivated him to introduce TripFlick.
