MVP #1: Hiker — Book a trip to discover the world in a unique way
Hey,
My name is Tobias and I like to make products! The following article is a little experiment and a new approach for bringing my ideas to life.
This is the first article of a series I want to start about building products. Every day, I have some ideas in my head and I sketch them in my little notebook. Some of them stay in my mind and some of them not. Some of them are really stupid ideas, but I think some of them are worth thinking about more closely. However, an idea is nothing if you don’t know how to execute it properly. So these series is an approach to bring some of my ideas to life, get some feedback and even build up a team believing in the idea and willing to create it with me.
“It’s not about the idea but the execution of the idea”
Problem
Traveling for me is discovering the world in a unique way. It is easy to get from A to B nowadays but it is getting harder to find unique experiences away from the mainstream. Hiker is an approach to change that and find the still existing travel nuggets and make them affordable. Get a ride with a truck driver, get onto a steamboat or fly with a little airplane. There are a lot of possibilities to travel and I think there is no web platform which covers it all.
Solution
The solution is to build a web platform, where users can offer a ride in their truck, boat, airplane or any other trip, in oder to:
The first MVP is called Hiker — a place where you can find and book special trips and spaces to travel from A to B. It is like Uber/Lyft for Airplanes, Boats, Trucks, Trains and any other Trips. First, I had the idea to build a Uber/Lyft to ride with truck drivers, which is still on top of request for startup.
But I think there are many more unused resources to make traveling more unique.
First Sketch
This time I decided to first build a MVP in Sketch to get a better idea of the product. It is a rough sketch but I think it explains the idea in a better way.
Getting Feedback
With my past projects, I learned that it is essential to get feedback in the beginning stages. To validate my idea, I set up a little questionnaire with Typeform to get the first feedback on whether the idea is really solving a problem or is it only solving a problem in my head :-). Feel free to answer the questions, it will only take you a minute.
Next steps
The idea behind these articles is not only to get a validation of my ideas but also to find people who want to work with me on the idea (Tweet me or leave a comment below, i‘ll get in touch with you). Perhaps the idea is not good or already exists; perhaps I need to rethink the idea. In any case, I think it is worth a try and I am really looking forward to all the feedback.
Yours truly,
Tobias
PS: I am thinking to start a newsletter. If you are interested in my ideas and thoughts, you can sign up anytime. I won’t spam you :-)
If you like this article hit the 💚. This will tell me to write more of it!
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Tobias is a Teacher & Maker + Founder of Teacherjobs.io, a job aggregator of teaching jobs and Publisher of the webmagazine Portraitslam.
