CruiseBe story. Our story. P.1.
The idea for the project which would help tourists plan their cruise vacations arose a few years ago. It happened when Marina (she’s also the project’s CTO) and I were on the cruise during our honeymoon trip.
That cruise vacation was not the first one for us, and we already knew the problems tourists face before the cruise and onboard.
Firstly, it takes a lot of time to find and choose an itinerary, a ship, attractions in ports, etc. No single resource can cover everything: you have to surf 3–4 different web sites and collect all this information on your own. Secondly, if you didn’t prepare for the cruise thoroughly, it’s hard to plan something along the way. The Internet on ships is very expensive, there is no proper connection, and offline resources are extremely scanty.
During one of the evenings on the ship, when we were trying to plan our next day, we were struck by an idea for the future startup. However, at that time we were engaged in another joint project in Ukraine, so this idea was shelved. At that time our business was connected with the retail and shopping centers. We were in the process of development, but then the market stagnated. The cruise website idea was revived.
In fact, it was a hard decision to make. Harder than any Pivot, I guess. You are 25–26 years old; you seem to have a good project, several tens of thousands of unique users a month, right contacts and agreements with the country’s leaders of retail, and good prospects. You understand that you need to either struggle desperately with minimal profit and wait until the market comes to life (by the way, it is happening now), or to change the market or idea. We decided to develop the tourist direction in parallel. It is how CruiseBe appeared.
Of course, the United States is the leading cruise market. We didn’t have any illusions about entering the market by ourselves.
Somewhere in October-November 2015, we began to look for opportunities and contacts for this…
To be continued…
