We are reinventing what visiting means.
When we traveled to Morocco with my good friend Amine 6 months ago, we made a pact on an Essaouiran rooftop eating a tajine, watching a gorgeous sunset, and listening to gnaoua music. We will achieve our common dream together: Building a successful company. This is what we’ve been working on for the past two months.
Where is the magic? ✨
fromyourcouch was born out of personal frustration. Not something we observed or analyzed, but something we felt.
The experience of visiting a place isn’t good enough. It comes down to accessibility, uniqueness, and immersion.
- You need to go there. Take a plane, spend money, have a high carbon footprint, pass through crowds & selfie sticks to see something. I am not even talking about people who simply can’t travel because of environmental, health & financial reasons.
- Everything is way too standardized. Group tours are composed of 20–30 different people. Audioguides are the same for millions of different visitors. Many people are left behind because of that. Aren’t we all different
- Feeling a magical connection with a place & its history is rare. During tours, we hear facts, not stories. We hardly remember anything after because of this lack of narration & sparkles.
Virtual tours on demand by passionate guides.
What the fuck are virtual tours? Well, we had no idea at the beginning!
VR seemed like an obvious choice, but it doesn’t make visits accessible at all. Asking people to buy expensive hardware to try our product is not fulfilling our mission.
Live-streaming looks like a no-brainer. We all saw the success of Airbnb Online Experiences. Even though the idea is sexy, it is far from being optimal. You pay between 10$ and 20$ to be on a Zoom call with ten strangers and listen to poor quality audio from a guide who shows you pictures and videos. Where is the immersion? Is it changing the way we visit?
We spent a lot of time talking to guides. They don’t do this job to spend their entire days in front of a screen. It’s not something they want to do. They did it during the COVID-19 crisis because they had no other choice. Meeting people in real life and being outdoor is what they love.
Videos? These can be pretty immersive. But they lack one thing: interaction. As a visitor, you are passively watching. What happens when you visit a place in real life? You move, get closer, make decisions, stop. You follow a guide, but you are still in control.
We are looking for this feeling of control. That’s why each one of our virtual tours is composed of immersive audio & visual support. Separate, not synchronized.
The audio is the story made by the guide. It’s where the heart of the experience lies. It has background music and sound effects to present a place in an immersive and unique way.
The visual support can vary, but guides tend to use Google Earth, a tool offering great flexibility: 3D views, street views, videos, images, texts.
People first.
Most of the solutions that tried to tackle this problem had an integrated approach. They decided to do everything themselves: producing and delivering the content to visitors. But, high-quality control implies high costs and slow operations.
There was an alternative option.
We decided to leverage the thousands of tour guides in the world who have the knowledge, expertise, and passion. fromyourcouch was born — a marketplace between tour guides and online visitors.
Finding the guides, and helping them create a new format of fully online tours was a top priority. We did it.
From more than 200 guides willing to join the adventure, we now have a community of +80 active guides from 27 different countries. We offer them a safe space where they can learn how to create virtual tours. Weekly random drinks & workshops, 24/7 support, team meetings, and resources we built are at their disposal.
Guiding in real-life will still exist. fromyourcouch is a way to reach people not used to doing tours. A complementary model where everybody wins, not a zero-sum game.
We also achieved something we are proud of. Guides feel part of a family. Friendships are being created. In a highly competitive profession, we gathered people together and made this journey collaborative. The level of energy and enthusiasm in the guide community is astonishing and growing every single day.
Product second.
The guides uploaded 30 tours in 2 months, and new ones are coming out every week. They learned everything from scratch and became podcasters & sound engineers. We couldn’t be more proud of their fantastic work.
Based on user calls and tests, we also worked on our product. In exchange for a small monthly fee, visitors get unlimited access to our virtual tours. We pay guides according to the monthly number of streams on their tours.
Visitors join our community. They can interact with other visitors, our team, and the guides. You want to meet, talk, and ask questions to your guide, right? We even include exclusive live sessions.
We are just getting started.
We are ambitious because this can be the project of our lives.
It is way too exciting to see all these stories coming to life in a new & immersive way.
We see stories about famous historical figures (Henri VIII, Gaudi or Rembrandt), small villages & families, beautiful natural reserves, or gorgeous paintings.
We defined everything thinking long-term, taking into account what guides love doing and which skills & format could be used in the physical world, too, not only online. Even though tours didn’t get digitized yet, our goal has never been to copy-paste real-life. It is to rethink the way a place gets visited. From the theater to the movies, not from the movies to Netflix.
🌈 Start visiting
👉 Become a guide
✉️ Get in touch at hello@fromyourcouch.com
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