Comparative BMC

Week 6- Creative Founder

Making a decision can be challenging

This week, our BAX team worked on comparative Business Model Canvas. We had a lot of discussions and struggle during the process, and we decide to pivot our new concept this week.

Let’s me tell you what happen this week:

Last Thursday, we pitched our concept about matching service, and we got some feedback from professors and classmates. They questioned us what different between our service than other matching service, such as Airbnb experience. Then, we created an excel, and trying to look at our competitors, but we figured out- the market is saturated. We were discussing, whether we want to bring our previous “travel memories” concept again. We can not make an assumption by just seeing a lot of competitors that exists in the marketing. Our group decided whether there are some opportunities for group travel- specifically for family travel. Family travel seems interested for us, but we don’t design for ourselves! By taking these questions, I asked some of young travelers and a previous employee at Expedia during the weekend, many of them think family travel market can be very small and limited. There are two take-away: 1. Most family travel problems can be solve internally, the value for family travel is to bring family member together. The time and memories are very precious. Do they really need a service? 2. If you have already team up with your friend, why you want to travel with others? Break the friendship? That is not how reality works.

I got back to my team, and we discussed about how our direction should go. We found out that the meaning of travel is about sharing the meaningful moments with the people you love, going to the excited places that different from your normal life, and making a connection with your previous dream and experiences. That travel experiences and memories are temporary, and time goes by very fast. _ Memories_ How about reconsider our previous memories again? At the end of the world, people can not take anything with them except these meaningful memories. Who you travel with, what you did, what you see, what you heard, how you interact with that unique environment can all become your memories. Travelers not only love to capture their journeys for future reference, but share details of daily events with others.

1. Document meaningful group travel experiences
2. Capture memories of new and exciting places
3. Elicit nostalgic memories from times & places

What more interesting is people have different sense: Sight, Smell, Hearing, Touch, and Taste. Currently social media platform focus more on hearing and sight, such as photos and videos, less focus on other human sense. There are some potentials that we can break that rules. BUT how?

Competitors always exist whatever your come up with

Competitors Business Model Canvas

Storyo selects the photos that best sum up the fun, and fleshes them out with time, places, pertinent posts, and friends’ photos of the same event.

Tripcast is a living travel journal for friends back home. It is one of the best apps available for not only capturing your trip, but sharing it with others.

Trover (acquired by Expidia)is a service that help travelers discover and save ideas for your next trip or adventure. (mainly through photos sharing)

Google Photo mainly focused on helping people upload photos and sharing with others for cloud storage.

So, we pivoted the new concept:

BAX is service for capturing and sharing photo-audio memories that helps people record immersive travel experiences.

We are interested in combing different human sense into their memories storage. We believe that the most precious things are not something your brought, but more intangible- The time and memories you spend with people you love and care about. We want to bring that time to our customers, so they reply on us on their next trip!

Next Steps

Now, validating new concept with potential users are our main goal. Next time, I hope our team can understand each us better rather than only focus on get things done. We are not only create a design project, but we are going to create a startup. There are many moments you have to switch ideas and validate the ideas. Design process is very hard, and you have to validate and iterate. You can’t give up if you found our your previous ideas doesn’t fit to the market. As a group, I hope we can build more trust with each other, and be transparent about our thoughts. I think we will get there! Stay turned.. :)