Venture Concept #1

My service plans to meet the needs of many young people across the world, ambitious I know, but I believe my service can satisfy this need and provide great value to the client. This need is to connect with other people, learn about different cultures, learn more about yourself and have an experience of a lifetime. The reason my target segment (young people – more specifically college students) has these needs is because of the world becoming more globalized, the age of living within the limits of your birthplace are gone, the world is expanding, becoming more multicultural and the sooner you can understand these cultures and other people, the more of an advantage you’ll have. One force creating this need is the trend to spend more on experiences rather than materialistic things. More and more young adults would rather spend money on an experience, like study abroad, music festivals, and vacations than materialistic things like a new TV or an Xbox. This provides an opportunity to create customized experiences that will change the perspective of the individual. Providing an invaluable learning experience, which will enable them to understand other people and other cultures a lot better than they did before. Thus, this market is defined demographically, rather than geographically. It is dependent on one’s openness to experience, interest in meeting others, curiosity about the outside world, craving for growth and if they are financially able to afford such an experience.

Customers are currently satisfying this need by vacations; however, it doesn’t allow them to immerse themselves into another culture. As they are visiting as a tourist, so they can’t understand the culture, the mindset or the societal norms and traditions. Instead, they scam the surface, thinking they’ve satisfied their need to see new things, meet new people and understand other societies. However, they haven’t. All they’ve done is go to a new place and look around and go to a few attractions and restaurants that are there for the tourists. My service will be providing an opposite experience, in which trip’s core activities will be focused around immersing them into the culture, meaning they will do what the locals do, understand how they live, and then compare it to your own. I believe this opportunity is huge, and will only continue to expand, especially considering the emphasis placed on travel by young people. I think this window of opportunity will continue to be open until someone else provides this service.

My service will offer customized cultural experiences for customers. How it works is the customer comes to me with a need: to travel to a new place and understand their culture. This need may vary in where they want to go, how they want to spend their time (partying or learning), what type of accommodation they want to stay in (apartments, university housing, or a house) and what type of area they want to stay (rural, suburban or in the city). I will then use my social capital to find a place for them to stay suiting their needs. I will plan out their entire trip; where they stay and what they do. Where the unique value comes in is they will be staying with my friends (the locals) and will be living how they live. This will allow for a much more inclusive, cultural learning experience. I have friends in all over the world that would help start up the business. All over London, all over England (Manchester, Hull, Reading, Leeds, Essex, Liverpool, Birmingham, Sussex and plenty more) Paris, Berlin, Austria, Dubai, Australia (Sydney and Melbourne) Iceland, Florida, New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and many more states. I would use this capital to match the client to a county of their choice and pay the hosts a small fee to let them stay with them. I would then plan out the vacation to suit their needs. If the hosts wanted to stay with the client afterwards, I wouldn’t even pay the host a fee, as the client would host next, allowing for a mutually beneficial scenario. 

The way I would make money is by taking a small fee of the total cost. This fee would start of at around 10-15% to allow me to make some money to reinvest in the business. Once it starts getting popular and I get the website and app running instead of relying on word of mouth I can cut this percentage down to around 5-8%. I would market my business using social media. This form of marketing suits my target segment – young adults. Due to the mass number of users in this demographic, social media is changing traditional advertising towards the digital age. This will allow me to reach a huge number of penitential clients for free!

The reasons customers would switch to my service would be to have a better travelling experience. Would you rather go and stay in a hotel and go to the London eye, Big Ben and houses of parliament and not meet many people, Or would you rather go and stay with people who go to the University of Central London or London School of Economics and go out to different clubs with them and meet a load of university students?  Those that choose the latter would be the type of people who would switch to my service, the people who want to learn something from another culture instead of just travelling as a tourist. My competitors would be travel agencies who plan vacations for clients, however, their weakness is they cannot provide a travel experience where the clients go and stay with locals at a cheaper cost. Instead they use expensive hotels which doesn’t provide as much value for my target segment. I would start of the business by creating an app and a website where clients can customize their experience by location and then I can get in contact with the hosts and plan out their trip suited to their needs. Eventually I would want paid media reps in each of the represented areas to market and advertise the service.

My most important resource is my social capital along with myself. My social capital allows me to start of the business at a low cost. And my cultural experiences I’ve had along with my emotional intelligence makes me the best person to provide this service. In five years, I plan to have reps in the countries offered and have given many people life-changing experiences. In 10 years, hopefully I’ve connected people all over the globe, nurturing understanding, personal growth and cultural understanding.