This is a blog about entrepreneurship, delayed flights, the Internet, mobile services, business enterprising and why the power of traveller behaviour will change the whole travel industry.
Jack Melcher-Claësson is an Internet loving entrepreneur, a proud family father, a football freak (soccer that is) and the co-founder of Traveas. Traveas mission is to simplify every journey for travellers around the world.
We at Traveas now have deep dialogs with a majority of the leading business travel agencies in Sweden and the Nordics, as well as the leading leisure and online agencies. We are in test phase with many of them and we are in contract stage with a couple of them. We have also started up dialogs with players outside the Nordics, and even outside of Europe, and we are of course very excited about this fact :-)
The road to get where we are have been a damn fast one I agree, at least when you look at it calendar time wise. Key for us have been to package our services in a very easy way, combined with an transparent and transaction based business model. Fair enough.
However, the main reason for us to become such fast runners have definitely been the dialog with our clients, the agencies. You see, the essence of our first offer was indeed interesting (our business idea is still the same), but the business model and the go to market approach apparently had some major improvement areas :-) In fact, they have changed a couple of times during this period, based upon experiences from our client dialogs. Believe me when I say that we wouldn’t even have come 10% of where we are right now if we had stuck with that first offering.
Our clients (as well as potential ones) have given us so much important feedback of what´s key for them for a service like ours within their own portfolio. Without their valuable thoughts, smart approaches and different angles, and of course our own capacity to absorb their input, we would still be struggling with our first offer.
So I would like to give a big thank you to all you people with open minds and creative brains at the different travel agencies we have talked to the past 8-10 months. We would be nowhere today without you.
At the same time I want to give some healthy tips to other entrepreneurs out there before you spend to much time in the office. Don´t try to do it all by yourself. Don´t wait before you start making sales calls to your potential market. The perfect product doesn’t exist. But what I do know is that great businesses exists, and it comes from hard work of course but mainly it comes from talking to your clients and give them what they really want, not to force something on them that you wish they want.
So, hands on to you guys still struggling to make your power point slides perfect:
A while ago I read a post by Peter "Poppe" Sandberg on Disruptive about a new cool web based service to animate your own movies. Poppe described the service Xtranormal as such an easy gig that anyone can do it.
Since I know my limitations when it comes to technology I of course was a bit skeptical. But within shortly I learned that he was right, it really was as easy as promoted.
Not that many minutes later my first work as an independent commercial movie producer was ready to hit the market :-)
So, I proudly present, Traveas first commercial ever!
So, to all you ad agencys, media bureaus, production companies, TV-stations and cable networks out there I´m sorry to let you know that my answer is NO, I cannot help you on a regular basis. My loyalty and priorities will still be with Traveas, even after this massive success :-)
Started more dialogs with potential clients in European countries such as Denmark, Finland, Norway, UK and Holland
Started a first dialog with a potential first client outside Europe, a very exciting dialog with a major player in India.
After that we have:
Attended the SIME08 conference in Stockholm, got inspired by many great speakers and panel discussions and as always we met with a lot of interesting and potential future partners.
Attended the Internetworld Top100 event in Stockholm, con grats to all nominated websites. Don´t be lazy though, cause next year we will challenge you all :-)
Finally we have:
Developed a new and very interesting distribution channel for our services, more about that later on.
Initialized tests with 4 new potential clients (travel agencies that is) and awaitening tests from 5 further agencies.
Just to mention a few things :-) How was your last couple of weeks?
Even though
I have been a part of the Internet revolution since the mid 90´s I still get
stunned by the power of its nature from time to time. So I will now share a Blogalanche
experience I just had that really shows the true impact of the blogosphere!
Recently we
opened up our service globally, ie it´s open for everyone no matter the country
or mobile operator, read more in my earlier blog post here
The effects
of that blog post amazes me, both from an awareness perspective not to mention
traffic wise. First we were reviewed by one of the leading blogs in Europe when
it comes to Internet and trends, Everything 2.0,
created by a true Internet pioneer: Mr Bob Stumpel
That led to
a listing at Killerstartups in the US, which scans the Internet in order
to list the hottest startups on a daily basis. Please visit the post and help us out by giving us your vote here!
Shortly
thereafter, we got reviewed by Makeuseof.com, which apparently is read by Japanese versions of similar
review sites. So shortly
thereafter we got picked up as Dot Com of the Day by 100shiki.com.
I can now
ascertain the following: We have
just doubled our daily traffic on Traveas.com five days in a row. That is
a increase of 3200% in less than a week, including a weekend. I´m stunned!
This has
completely turned the country split on our visitors around, from a clear
dominating position for Sweden (naturally) to a the new leader Japan,
unendangered in its first place.
Now that´s
what I call a Blogalanche experience and the tune of the week at the
Traveas headquarters is of course nothing else than this old floorfiller :-)
Dear
Traveas friends and loyal readers of this blog, today is a very special day.
Today is a day all startups dream to achieve and to experience, a huge
milestone in our young company´s history. The day when we reveal the identity
of our first client :-)
So I am
therefore extremely proud to let you know of the partnership between us and VIA
Travel presented earlier today. VIA Travel is a leadingTravel
Management Company in Sweden and the Nordic countries.
Through this partnership we will provide VIA
Travel´s clients with TravelPlanner, a personalized mobile
itinerary containing all relevant and updated information concerning a trip such as flight dates and times,
contact information and a map to their hotel as well as current weather
information for the destination. In addition
to the mobile itinerary the TravelTrackeris activated, so for
any change that occurs the VIA Travel client
automatically receives an SMS update with the latest status of their flight.
Read more about the partnership in the attached
press release.
Congratulations all VIA Travel clients,
welcome to Travel 2.0 and enjoy your new modern and simpler way of
travelling.
I am
extremely proud to say that we have now presented our partnership with SIME
08 (Scandinavian Interactive
Media Event 2008). SIME is the leading event in Northern Europe when it comes
to digital opportunities. This years event is taking place on the 12th
and 13th of November at the Rigoletto Theater at Kungsgatan in
Stockholm, Sweden.
Traveas
role is to provide all international speakers at SIME with
automatically updated status about their flights to Stockholm, directly in
their mobile phone. The speakers will get a personalized mobile itinerary containing all
relevant information about their trip to Stockholm, such as flight dates and
times, name, address and a map to their hotel as well as current weather in
Stockholm. In addition to the mobile itinerary the Traveas TravealTracker
is also activated, so for any change that occurs on the trip the speaker
automatically receives an SMS update with the latest flight status.
I am extra proud to enter the partnership as this year´s theme for SIME
is: The DNA of Change and I truly believe that our services is making change within the travel industry. Firstly by switching the power of the industry from airlines and
companies to travellers and individuals, secondly from an environmental
perspective (more about that in a coming blogpost).
If you haven´t yet decided to visit SIME, maybe this
selection of speakers can help your decision:
Michael
J. Wolf (Author, former President MTV Networks)
David
Sifry (Founder of Technorati)
Hans Rosling (Founder of Gapminder,
professor at Karolinska Institutet)
Joi
Ito (CEO of Creative Commons, Chairman of Six Apart
Japan etc.)
Pelle Törnberg (former CEO Metro,
former CEO MTG.)
Lena K Samuelsson (Editor in Chief at
Svenska Dagbladet)
Net
Jacobsson (Director of International Business Development
at Facebook)
At a very
early stage we knew that the services within the Traveas portfolio will
be global from day one. Even so, it´s hard to conquer the world in just a day
or two and we had to start somewhere. So, we launched a first public version of
TravelTrackerin Swedish this summer, and just a couple of weeks later
we conceptualized and packaged our next service TravelPlanner for Travel
Agencies (I will tell you more about TravelPlanner in another blog post
within shortly).
Having done
so, we have noticed an increasing interest from users in other countries such
as the Nordics, the rest of Europe, the US and even Asian countries. They visit our site and blog and even with lack of Swedish language knowledge
they seem to be very curious about our service. Many of them have contacted us
to see how they can start using TravelTrackerand how to order
it. This is of course extremely fun for us working with Traveas.
In the same
time, our quite aggressive approach towards major players in the Swedish travel
agency market has led to international vibes. Both agency networks (originated
from the Swedish branch) as well as other international players have shown interest of letting us provide their clients with our services. So last week the
Traveas team went for our first European tour, visiting both Paris and
the Business Travel Show in Düsseldorf. This is of course great fun, but primarily it is
a very important confirmation that our way of thinking when it comes to distributing
our services is the right one. We have created something that agencies in many
ways can benefit from.
So, with
all these exciting international opportunities the time has now come for
Traveas to open up our for the rest of the world. We do so by launching an
English version of Traveas.com where now anyone, anywhere in
the world, no matter of which phone operator you use, can search for a
flight and order a tracking service.
This also
means that Traveas – The blog from now on will be written in English.
So, welcome
all international users and readers, wherever you come from! Please do not
hesitate to contact us with any thought about our services, good or bad
doesn´t matter, we would like to know what you think.
Jack Melcher-Claësson is an Internet loving entrepreneur, a proud family father, a football freak (soccer that is) and the co-founder of Traveas. Traveas mission is to simplify every journey for travellers around the world.
