We interview Megan Wester, Senior Director of Marketing at the American Society of Travel Advisors (ASTA), about their annual Entrepreneur of the Year Award, presented at ASTA's Global Convention in Puerto Rico in May.
The Award provides a great platform for entrepreneurs to be recognized in front of hundreds of travel professionals and suppliers in attendance at ASTA's Global Convention. This is a fantastic opportunity for the winner to make connections and build new relationships that will help support their continued success.
👉 Apply online at astaglobalconvention.org/EntrepreneurAward.cfm before March 20, 2023.
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What is the ASTA Entrepreneur of the Year Award?
This annual award, sponsored by the Dan and Gloria Bohan Foundation, celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit in the travel and hospitality industry by honoring innovators who are leading the way, whether it is creating a new product, introducing a new service or technology, or simply innovating in a complete...
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I recently built a simple MVP for a community of travel guides to create shared maps where members can mark their long-term locations and temporary travel spots. Meant to help members see who's where and discover potential meetup opportunities when their paths cross. Basically to replace a manual Google My Maps overview +community features. The MVP is at spaces.manyways.app/en
Now I'm eager to expand this concept to other communities or organizations that could benefit from such a tool. I'm looking for pilot customers/users who can help shape the product's development through their feedback and specific use cases.
My question to you all: How have you successfully found and convinced pilot customers for your travel tech products? What approaches worked best in the early stages?
For those who've run successful pilot programs, did you charge for early access or offer it free? How did you structure your feedback collection? Any lessons learned would be incredibly valuable.
Thanks in advance for your insights!
Hi Philip, thanks for inviting me to the MVP and well done on what you've created!
The answer to your question depends on whether your product is a "vitamin" or a "painkiller" (stealing someone else's saying!)
If people need your product to solve a critical problem, then you're a "pain killer" and they will beat down the doors to try it out, and probably pay to be an early customer.
If however your product is more "nice to have" and people can get by without it, then you're in the "vitamin" category and things are much harder.
People will pay for ugly looking "pain killer" products, but a "vitamin" product probably needs to look and feel 10x better to even have a chance.
If you can make organisation only maps (eg restrict by the user's email address) that solves a critical use case (eg compliance, reporting), then you will have stronger chances of early uptake.
That's my 2c!
I've struggled with this greatly. Our products are a bit different but have similar elements. Yours in particular seems to have the "tinder" or whatever requirement where you need users to attract users and I believe that requires capital. I believe paypal started off by paying users $50 to sign up (which was considerably more back then) until they had the critical mass of users necessary for the app to gain traction.
I essentially signed up here with a similar question.
thanks for your thoughts, thats definitely the case for a community vision where you need to attract first users to then attract users :D with this spaces version my idea is more to offer a tool for community leaders or companies instead of attracting users directly...
If you're keen to look at the MVP you can join a demo space here: spaces.manyways.app/join/u9JlJEpbLuvV6Fz7pZkc if you wanna create your own space, just hit me up.
That link (after signing in) gives me "To get started you need to select a space or wait for approval." I can't see a space to join.
sorry pasted completly wrong link please try again spaces.manyways.app/join/u9JlJEpbLuvV6Fz7pZkc 🙏
The functionality is pretty basic right now.
Search and filters to find locations on specific datest will be added and there could be an import to not only show users but also locations from data you already have like events or offices. Also notifications that give users an update when there are new locations added around them could be an option.
But the idea is to keep it flexible for different use cases for each space.