Isadora Sun is a millennial with a dream. She believes in a world where woman can travel the world freely, and has always believed in following her wanderlust. After graduating from Edinburgh university, she spent 14 months backpacking across Central Asia, South East Asia and North America. This journey inspires her tostart GoWonder.
Q: Describe the business, core products and services in one paragraph
GoWonder is a support network for women travellers to connect with one another, share stories, and make recommendations (e.g. a reliable taxi service for when you arrive in Laos at 2:00 am). We are also a market place for businesses that want to reach out to women.
GoWonder is a support network for women travellers.
Q: Who are your key customers?
Women student and gap year travellers
Q: Who are your key partners?
Hostels, boutique hotels, taxi services, women travel bloggers and tour companies
Q: What business are you most likely to be compared to?
Yelp for women travellers
Q: What problem are you trying to solve for your customers?
The number one reason holding women back from travelling is the risk of running in to a dangerous situation without a travel companion, so some women travel less because they are always waiting for someone else to accompany them. We want to prevent them from running into the dangerous situations by offering advice, tips from fellow women travellers who have been there, and locals who know the area well. So more women can have the confidence to pack their bag and GoWonder with or without someone else.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve for your partners?
Tour companies, hostels/hotels will see a major increase in customers if they paid attention to the needs of women travellers. We are not asking for special treatment; just a different kind of service to male travellers. For women travel bloggers, we will be able to provide better exposure.
Q: What financial support did you have to launch the business?
We are bootstrapping at the moment; we have a wonderfully talented team of designers and developers who are driven to make it easier for girls to get out there and see the world. We will be looking for funding soon, once our prototype is tried, tested enough and proven effective.
Q: Who validated the idea first – investors or customers?
Our team validated the idea first then customers. We are four girls who love to travel; we are building something we wish we had when we travelled.
More women are satisfisying their wanderlust and going solo to see the world. (Image credit: (Olga_Danylenko/iStock)
Q: What is the revenue model and strategy for profitability?
We would be a market place for travel related businesses that want to reach out to women travellers. We would make money from our affiliates as well as display advertising.
Q: What is the market opportunity? How scalable is this business?
In the US alone, the girlfriend gateway market made almost US$200 million last year and that is just one company in the US, proving that women-only travel is indeed on the rise, more women than ever before are choosing to satisfy their wanderlust and go see the world. It will be hard to scale in the early stages due to the sensitive nature of our business, we are dealing with women travellers’ security here, we are going to focus on improving our solution, what do women want? How can we deliver it better than anyone else?
Q: Competitive analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
Our team is definitely our strength: we understand first hand the difficulties, challenges women face whilst travelling. We also know exactly the kind of information women need when researching a destination, choosing accommodation as well as activities.
Tripadvisor is doing a great job for things to do but when it lacks relevant information for women travellers, we are at a much more risk adverse.
Screening businesses and deciding if they are women friendly is definitely the thing that keep us awake at night. And how to screen out fake reviews too. If you have suggestions, we would love to hear it!
Q: Who are the team members and advisors?
The core team consists of four girls: two developers, one UI/UX designer and one person on business development and strategy.
The GoWonder team
Q: Why do you think you are the best people to make this vision happen?
We’re all passionate about travel, between the four of us we have over 15 years of travelling experience and we have all experienced the obstacles of travelling as a girl and we want to change that.
Q: What’s the motivation behind doing this?
I spent 12 months after graduation backpacking – it was a total accident. I never planned to be away from home for so long. Originally my parents were against the idea of me going away for two months solo never mind twelve months and they wanted to know how safe the places I was visiting were. It was hard to find information like that.
How do you rate the safety of a place? Eventually after weeks of googling and reading a ton of blogs, I came up with a travel plan and profiles for all the places I was going to visit, I rated the safety based on information from Google, Lonely Planet and friends who came from the area but I found it so frustrating when guide books only had one or two paragraphs on safety for women travellers. I wished there was a one-stop site where I could find all of this information without having to go to so many different sites.
But what really motivated me to build GoWonder is after I got home, my girlfriends would ask me how I did it, how much they want to travel but they are too afraid to do it solo and how my trip empowered them to think about not waiting around for others and to just go for it. We want to give women the reassurance, with relevant travel information so they are empowered, confident enough to go see the world.
