Entrepreneurship & Travel: Personas
In my first post of the series, Entrepreneurship & Travel, I ended on a positive note of why innovating in the travel industry is a good idea. In this one, I’ll detail one of the biggest frustrations.
It's always good design practice to have a persona you’re building a product for in mind. This helps you prioritize the right features and requirements to build. The product we want to build intends to connect a traveller with the information of what’s local and reflective of the true culture of a place. Who could be the best source of this information but the locals themselves? When coming up with a persona for this product, all of us agreed on the same set of characteristics — avid traveller, extroverted, tech-savvy, but most importantly, someone who plans out their trips in great detail. This seemed almost obvious to us — if you’re building a product connecting people for conversations, both parties need to eager enough to talk to each other and have the conversation. And a planner would be able to gain the most from such a conversation. But this was entirely based on our assumption that the conversation with a local was how a traveller would want to access local information. However, The Job To Be Done is to connect a traveller with local information — is the conversation really the best way?
The best way to validate an assumption is to talk to your customers. Every successful product has always put its customer first and has really listened to what the customer wants.
So we took notes from these prominent founders and got busy talking to avid travellers. And 50-something interviews later — we were even more confused than before.
Here’s the thing about the travel industry — It’s HUGE. Everyone is a traveller — and everyone has different interests and pain points. This broadens the possibilities of who the persona could be. Now, we have The Inexperienced Traveller who isn’t confident about how to travel and could use insights. We have The Lazy/Spontaneous traveller who just doesn’t like planning but wants to know what to do at their destination. We have The Planner, who could use insights from the locals while planning their trips. And finally, you have The Backpacker — the ones who truly know how to experience a new place.
The Backpackers are usually extroverts, or at the very least they’re comfortable talking with strangers and new acquaintances. They won’t really *need* our product. However, they provide us with the validation that locals do have insights on the best things to do. The Planner isn’t necessarily someone comfortable with talking to strangers. And a lot of them say that since the information is available online through blogs and youtube videos, they would much rather put in the time and do the research they intended to do anyway instead of reaching out to a stranger. However, they also state that since they’re travelling to a new place — they ARE a tourist and do want to also experience the new place as a tourist, and they would like suggestions and tips from other travellers like them who have visited the place before. Then we come to The Spontaneous Traveller. The Spontaneous Traveller usually only keeps a rough outline of things to do or areas to visit. They like to then take their time and explore their destinations by talking with cafe owners, local business people, anyone they can find. They do want local insights, but they want them spontaneously and in the moment. The Beginner may well benefit from talking to anyone, a traveller or a local. They form a bit of an unknown persona. And so we’re left with The Spontaneous travellers and The Beginners who could use local insights in the moment, and the planners, who could use the tips, reviews and itineraries of travellers like them who had visited a place before. Who makes a better early adopter? Do we need to limit the product to either one or do we build a community of travellers and locals alike letting both The Planner and The Spontaneous traveller get the information they need?
“When you start in a small, focused market, it’s a lot easier to build liquidity and get to a meaningful percentage of that market, becoming the best place for both the supply and demand to go. When this happens, your network effect kicks in and the market tips towards you, accelerating your lead. On the other hand, when you go after a big, competitive market, you’re setting yourself up for a long, uphill battle before you have a chance for a network effect to kick in and the market to tip. It’s always better to find where you can win (what I think of as finding your red hot center) and then expand from there, than try to go after the big hairy audacious goal from the beginning.” — Food Delivery Wars, Sarah Tavel
Yes, we do. A community can only succeed with an adequate amount of both supply and demand. And onboarding many customers occurs with the network effect when your app has gained momentum. So, at least initially, focusing on one type of customer and promising one experience through the product helps with maintaining the quality of the experience for the user. This can onboard more users and after the product has achieved the required level of popularity, the product can be built for other personas too. And between Planners and Spontaneous Travellers, the latter can’t easily access the information they need — they are more desperate for this product than The Planners. A product that can digitally replicate the spontaneous act of stopping a local in the street to ask for advice, but matching the traveller with the information best suited for them, is something that is needed in this industry.
Interestingly, this is completely different from the persona we had originally envisioned (The Planner).
