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:
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?
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.
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.
