Pune (India) based start-up, JoGuru, promises to help travellers plan their vacation without the need for a travel agent or search for trips online through a Personalised Itinerary Planner which comes with an integrated hotel booking feature.

CTO and founder Saket Newaskar (pictured left) tells WIT about the platform where travellers can discover, connect and share information under one roof.

Q: Describe the business, core products and services in one paragraph

We believe JoGuru.com is the world’s best algorithmic trip planner, a place where travellers can plan their trips anywhere across the world in a matter of minutes. Since the last one year, thousands of travellers have used the platform to create their trip plans and also book hotels. Other users are able to see the trip plans already made, and they can use them for their own travel plans.

Q: Who are your key customers?

The whole ecosystem of travellers across the world who want to travel by themselves, and want to create their own unique travel plans. We notice our service is more popular with young women,

Q: What business are you most likely to be compared to?

Tripomatic and Mygola are the two established start-ups we are fast catching up with. However we believe we are far more tightly integrated with booking engines than them, and are in a better position to recommend the right hotels and activities to the user.

Q: What problem are you trying to solve for your customers?

When a traveller is planning a trip to a city where she has not been before, he generally looks for a lot of information on things to do, and how best to utilise her time. She also needs to find out what are the best times to be in at a particular place, what are the best locations to stay in and what are the best modes of transportation so as to get the best holiday experience. JoGuru basically makes this whole exercise easy and fun, as the platform is intuitive and makes the whole exercise hassle free to work out the logistics.

Q: What financial support did you have to launch the business?

We put in our own money in the beginning. Then we raised funding from an angel investor.

Q: Who validated the idea first – investors or customers?

Customers of course!

Q: What is the revenue model and strategy for profitability?

Hotel bookings and advertisement campaigns for tour operators are our biggest source of revenue currently. We also plan to add activity bookings to JoGuru.com in the next few days.

Q: What is the market opportunity? How scalable is this business?

Globally more than 500 million leisure trip plans were made online last year. We are making this process of trip planning easy. I know a lot of people have tried with similar models, but no one has seen traction like us.

Q: Competitive analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats

Strengths:

• Really easy to use UI for travel planning and booking
• Tight interlinking with booking engines
• Unique content highlighting logistical information necessary for planning and booking
• High traction and repeat usage
• Unique theory of constraints based algorithms that power our recommendation engine
• Social sharing of normal trip plans made easy – You can see what other are planning
• Low cost of acquisition of customers

Weakness:

• Too many zombie travel start-ups in the ecosystem have created too much clutter in users and investors mind. People are biased and sceptical about real and genuine innovation in travel space.
• Limited resources to use for marketing and sales effort. We are depending on the word of mouth as of now.

Opportunities:

• 500 million trips were planned last year using online aid. This is really a big opportunity if approached appropriately. Also the time is correct now. There were some start-ups, which were way ahead of their time. Timing is important from a technology and market readiness perspective. The timing is just about getting right now.

Threats:

• Of course the clutter other non genuine innovations are creating is a big threat for the travel start-up ecosystem
• Economic upheavals have been known to affect the tourism ecosystem – however, if the approach is global, online start-ups can overcome that

Q: Who are the team members and advisors?

We are currently an 18-member team. There were there member founders  –  myself (Saket), Praveen Kumar, Karthik Ramachandra – when we started the company. All of us were working fulltime on day jobs. We used to be roommates in Delhi at that time. We scored an angel funding, and Praveen decided to quit his job and work on JoGuru fulltime.

When business picked up, and we started seeing more work we decided to hire domain experts for technology, content and marketing. There was a time when Praveen was overloaded, and both myself (Saket) and Karthik couldn’t handle the jobs together. I decided to take the jump fulltime into JoGuru. We have now managed to attract significant talent in all domains. We have people who have 10 to 15 years’ work in companies like rediff, big adda and shaadi.com.

Q: Why do you think you are the best people to make this vision happen?

The best people who can take this product ahead are those who are tech savvy and have significant insight into online travel research and booking behaviour. These are travellers who are power users of the internet, and also people who have significant understanding and passion for the travel and tourism industry.

Q: What’s the motivation behind doing this?

The founding team was never happy working in corporate jobs. The freedom of setting up our own business has always a big motivation. We always wanted to be our own bosses. With JoGuru we found a business, which involved aspects we were really passionate about i.e Travel and technology.