Keep contracting to pay the bills. As you guys save up some cash, hire a designer to make the pages prettier.

So many people will disregard the praise for your site if it's ugly or they can't figure it out.

Edit: A little more food for thought - I opened the page you linked, then went to the homepage, then closed the page. It just didn't appeal to me visually. It wasn't until I saw the comment about charging too much that I even realized you sold something.

So on the cost thing - split test! Run a test between $5 and $10. Seriously. Combine a pretty product with a price that seems just barely over the limit and you will likely find that people are finding your product "re-assuringly expensive". It costs $10 and it's pretty. It must be a high quality itinerary.

I agree with the Split test, but also while you are at it, run some landing page test. However, that means you have to have alternatives to test, so get the visual design stuff right and have a few versions to test with a specific conversion event in mind that is not "buy" As of now the page elements are so incongruous it's just baffling.

Quick question: why is this a website? this seems like information I would want on my smartphone so I could have easy access on the go.

Thanks! I think you're right and a great idea. We've discussed a redesign for a while now. We couldn't justify the cost when we were bootstrapping. Now that some cash will begin to roll in again I think it would be worth it.

Email me at inlith@gmail.com. I might be able to help you out with the site redesign.

I am a freelance web designer and i love helping out startups with tight budgets. My portfolio is at madebyargon.com

According to reams of empirical data prices with 7's or 9's as the last digit (e.g. $17, $49) tend to convert best. I would suggest testing prices between $7 - $11 as a simple, 'low hanging fruit' way to get started.

My immediate feedback is that you are charging too much. I can buy a travel book which details hundreds of things about SF for ~$20, used $10. I can get a Google itinerary for many places for free.

Second, this seems like an impulse buy sort of item. ( i.e. I'm stuck visiting somewhere new but haven't had time to research it.) A mobile app that allowed quick access to new itineraries via gps look-up might make for a better sales rate. But I don't see anything changing until your price-point accounts for the competition's prices.

good point, but being on the webpage looking at a focused itinerary of a place I am going to is much more compelling than buying a one size fits all guide book. And for the cost of parking ($7.50), it seems well priced.

Take heart: Without AdWords, Google itself was an idea that was amazing but a failing startup. You need a better revenue model than competing with cheap guidebooks.

Here's one idea: Give it away but include coupons for each stop on the itinerary. It's Groupon for travelers. Consider offering an app so people can easily carry it with them and it will always be up-to-date with the latest destinations and deals.

Thanks! I mentioned this below, but we're running a small test with essentially this approach. We're giving away the itinerary for free and then trying to upsell/cross-sell other related services -- such as a San Francisco CityPass, tours and p2p experiences. If you'd like to take a look you can check it out here (you'll have to enter your email address to get the free itinerary) -- http://bit.ly/enWxWz

My concern with partnering with restaurants and retailers is that I feel like it's a slippery slope to disingenuous recommendations. Plus, why would a restaurant offer a coupon to a traveler (at least a coupon of value)? There's no chance of repeat business. Just some thoughts, would love to get more feedback, if you have any.

> Plus, why would a restaurant offer a coupon to a traveler (at least a coupon of value)?

Because it brings in business. I see restaurants advertising for tourists all the time. Look in any in-flight magazine or any of the free guidebooks that are given away in tourist areas. They're full of ads and coupons for tours, restaurants, museums and attractions. That's a business model worth investigating.

The downside is it's a real boots-on-the-ground business that requires a heavy investment in sales effort to make it work. The upside is that once you sign up a customer (assuming they have a positive experience) it is highly likely they will repeat. You could start with just one city and if it works grow it from there.

Good luck to you!

Fair enough -- I was thinking more along the lines of a Groupon type coupon.

The problem is that you need to connect with the person who is traveling at exactly the right time. too soon and you lose mind-share, too late and it's no longer necessary. you need to figure out the delivery mechanism that works well. Maybe see if you can partner up with groupon travel destinations as an adder and offer them a split of it. so if groupon sells a hotel package in Chicago you should be offering your Chicago package. I think living social offers vacation packages too.

You can offer a few different levels of service too: default is web/you print at home. You can offer a full color printed version with the order if you want as well. logistically this is harder but it seems like more of a deal.

There is also the fandango way of doing it too. offer the ability to prepay for the tickets and take a small commission off the top for that. that's tougher to sell to the consumer because you don't have the trust relationship and might leave them stranded at the venue with no valid tickets. It would be slick to have this so that they didn't have to wait in line at all. make it opt in though and let them select what they want to actually go to see/do.

An iPhone app that has everything integrated would be great but it could also be as easy as just an interface for the pdf. If you got it into the appstore you would increase your visibility a bit especially if you target the "what should I do in x" queries with adwords that linked to a specific version of your app. you could also have inapp purchases that would download a new guide. cross selling in your apps is a good thing in this case.

pretty interesting idea. I'd probably buy the sf one if I go there ever but you have to reach me at the right time....

Thanks for the great ideas - some of our thinking has been along the same lines. One of our biggest barriers is funds, which means we have to push as hard and fast as we can before we are totally depleted.

Design is something on our list, but neither of us are designers, and getting a good design will cost a fair amount.

We have tried to provide them in physical format, but the price significantly exceeds that of a travel guide - I'm not sure if it makes sense.

We haven't considered the fandango route - I guess it is a revenue stream that we should investigate.

The iphone app is coming... but its not feature packed, because we had to outsource it, and as always, funds are limited.

I'd say go for the print version with the expectation that not too many people are going to buy it. There is a well known psyhcological device called price fixing that shows that people are more likely to buy/pay more for the mid range option when presented with a high priced option. Look at the basecamp signup page for this. People are predictably irrational. (check out that book for more good stuff like this; chapter 1 in particular for this example)

Do you get to own the code for the iPhone app or are you beholden to one company for updates?

I had a similar idea sometime ago. I think you can try a ton of things before deciding that it's failing.

Let users create their own guides, which they can share with others for free. User generated content can be a huge driver of traffic. Then your business model becomes freemium. Normal users' guides are free, but you pay a little for "expert" guides.

Get professional tour guides on board. For example, in the UK we have blue badge guides who are certified. Getting them on your site will add some credibility.

Make some deals with existing tour companies, either to offer discounts through your site or just a cut of ticket sales.

Have you considered selling your existing guides as ebooks on Amazon or other platforms? Even if you have some awesome guides, I don't know about them because I've never heard of your site. I do go to Amazon to buy travel guides when I'm travelling. If I see your guides show up in the search, I will at least look at a sample on my Kindle. You could do both - have some free guides for promotion and have some cheap ones to make some revenue.

Have you considered selling hard copies of your guides? Most people don't have a way to read a PDF when they are travelling.

Use the Foursquare API to show a "hot destinations" chart on the homepage. Show where people are checking in and link to your guides for those places.

Use buysellads or call businesses directly to place very targeted ads on the site. Affiliate links for tickets and hotel bookings may also work. AirBNB has an affiliate program - ride their success wave.

There are lots more things you could try. The important things I feel are generating lots more content and being creative about distribution channels.

I think your business model might be wrong. As Iaks points out below, the $5 price point is not far from that of a used travel book.

Perhaps offer the content free, then work with top restaurants and retailers on the 'tours' you recommend and get them to offer coupons / deals or advertising, of which you can get a cut. People touring a city will get hungry, and if you can point them to a great place, they'll thank you.

We're running a small test with essentially this approach. We're giving away the itinerary for free and then trying to upsell/cross-sell other related services -- such as a San Francisco CityPass, tours and p2p experiences. If you'd like to take a look you can check it out here (you'll have to enter your email address to get the free itinerary) -- http://bit.ly/enWxWz

My concern with partnering with restaurants and retailers is that I feel like it's a slippery slope to disingenuous recommendations. Plus, why would a restaurant offer a coupon to a traveler (at least a coupon of value)? There's no chance of repeat business. Just some thoughts, would love to get more feedback, if you have any.

Priority #1 is to remain genuine. That's what you stand for.

Restaurants might actually be more open to offering coupons to travellers - in a sense, those customers are not repeat business, so they shouldn't be worried about impacting their long term pricing with the local market.

Ultimately, I think you need to focus first on building enough value here with consumers - I don't like to suggest making things free, but in this case I think it's something you have to give away and monetize in other ways. There's nothing bad about that approach (Google does it), but it does require a higher volume of users for it to make sense.

Good luck!

I don't think this product entirely competes with travel books.

I think the value is that it makes the decisions for you. You already have your itinerary set in logical/geographic order.

If I'm running through a city for 2 days, I know I can't squeeze in everything. I can either waste time deciding what to do or I can buy this and see something I know will be awesome.

Not to say that there isn't room for other revenue streams or that other revenue streams may be better, but I don't think direct sales should be discounted before a proper test.

Yes...you absolutely nailed the value we believe we're providing. Thanks :-). In fact, we've thought about re-marketing ourselves as "last minute travel guides" or something to that affect.

....ImpromptuItinerary.com? It's available. I don't know if I like it though. Too many vowel sounds, not enough hard consonants. Though the name is a pretty good description of the product.

The problem is that even though you have a great idea, that's only one part of the equation. To have a successful product you have to have four aspects: the market, marketing, design, features - in that order (got that from "Start Small, Stay Small".

Everyone could say that the features in your product are amazing. But if you're in a market where customers don't pay, or if you're unable to reach them with the right marketing, then a perfect product is useless.

You have to determine the most profitable segment of your market. And find the cheapest way to market to them. What's the expected lifetime value of a user? Is it less than the cost to acquire that user through Adwords/Facebook? Then run through some ads. And invest some time in learning to optmize the ads.

What are some keywords that people are searching for that would lead users to your product? Are there many people competing for those terms? It might be worthwhile to invest time/money doing SEO. It seems you have a lot of content that might be worthwhile.

You've solved the hard part of having a good product. Now you have to figure out how to market it well.

Personally, I think they solved the easy part.. and the hard part is left. Creating a product is easy these days, but getting traction is like black magic.

I think people love "the idea" of your idea. People love to imagine they're off on a vacation to Paris, and they'll have so much to think of, they'll probably want a locally-authored tour guide. So they're excited about traveling, going to Paris and finding lots of cool things to do there. But not necessarily from your guide books. When the time comes to actually go to Paris, the problem for you guys is that there's a TON of free information. You're competing with the simplest of all Google searches: "What should I do in Paris?", not to mention dozens of in-flight magazines, tourist info packets, maps, concierges, coupon books etc etc. When you're competing with so much free information, a $4.99 price point is too high, imho.

There is definitely some resistance to paying for travel information when so much of it is available for free - I totally agree with you on that. However, our product is more aimed at short trips, where investing in lots of time to research the destination just doesn't make sense.

I feel like $4.99 is a reasonable price considering the amount of time it saves you.

What would you consider a reasonable price? Or specifically... what would be your own personal "too expensive" threshold?

I don't think offering more information, or charging less, would solve your problem. If I had wanted more information, I'd buy a guidebook. As SHOwnsYou mentioned, it's about having (good) itinerary decisions made for me. The value isn't in the amount of information, but the judgment that went into filtering and digesting the over-info out there in other travel sites/books.

To complement that value, your design needs to give a sense of 'here's the distilled gem about this city' - it should just 'hit me'. Instead, I am presented instead with a rather drab plain page, which feels like it'd take forever to get through to gratification.

I'd echo suggestions to look into redesigning the page to make the visual impact, fast.

A question for you: Why did you decide to offer these travel guides worldwide instead of concentrating on one city first?

It seems like you should test out your ideas on one city (which is much easier to market), then once you find a successful model, start branching out into other cities.

You could spend some money on PPC ads on keywords such as "San Francisco tours", "San Francisco golden gate bridge", etc, and test out different landing pages and different types of guides.

I also think something like this would work better if the information was all free, and people get to rate the quality of each tour. The ones with higher ratings will be shown higher up - maybe offer prizes to authors who have highly rated tours.

Court the traffic gatekeepers who reach your target audience by pitching them via email. In my experience asking a single direct/focused question elicits a response at least 50% of the time.

Inbound link juice from being featured on a site that's old, trusted and authoritative is 90% of the SEO game. Getting traffic is all about courting and pitching traffic gatekeepers at progressive levels of difficulty/reach, so you might as well start refining your approach.

For an inspiring read on growing your traffic check out "Crush It" by Gary Vaynerchuk, and start getting your content and community hustle on!

I looked at the 2 itineraries available for my city and it was the typical tourist attractions. Like others have commented they're already widely recommended online and in print guidebooks. If I made an itinerary for a friend i'd recommend specific niche places the locals go relevant to their interests.

What if you bump the price up to $20+ per itinerary then offered more value by having each itinerary custom made to match each customer's personal interests. Maybe also have the 'local experts' who made the guide ranked like a restaurant on yelp to build up trust.

Well the idea was to build a marketplace in the hope that we would get lots of different itineraries for each location, with each one tackling the city from a different angle. It would be up to the individuals to write itineraries how they deemed fit, and the review/rating process would make sure the best ones were highlighted.

Unfortunately, so far we have had to seed the marketplace with itineraries which are costing us $100+ each, so we dont have the luxury of making many itineraries for each city.

Also, each itinerary takes many weeks to write - $20 just wouldn't cover the expenses of bespoke itineraries.

There's little chance you'll make enough to survive selling $ itineraries... I suggest just pivoting and becoming a consumer travel website ala TripAdvisor, or GogoBot.. if you're not going into the ticket space, you need content, and lots of free content.

You also need to learn more about the amount of traction it will realistically take to make a good amount of profit. Even 1000 daily visitors won't do you any good with your current business model. How are you gonna get visitors? You can't just sit tight and wait.

> how is it possible that everyone thinks our idea is good, > but we haven't managed to gain momentum?

Because you haven't achieved product/market fit.

For example, you're trying to charge individuals who are traveling - have you explored charging travel-related companies? I could see your app being very compelling for travel agencies, travel book publishers, neighborhood merchant associations, Chambers of Commerce, and businesses that want to advertise to travelers.

Maybe you're using the wrong channels. How about reaching out to biz devs at all the various Expedia-type sites to see if they are interested in doing a little up-selling during check out as an affiliate or something? This would give you targeted users who already have their wallets opened which is perfect for an impulse purchase. I think partnerships will go along way if executed properly.

I completely agree and we would love to partner with someone like this. Talking with others who have tried going down this road, I've heard it's difficult to impossible to land a partnership like that, so we've been hesitant to put a lot of effort into trying. Perhaps it's time to give partnerships a shot.

Test your biz dev skills on the smaller sites first and it will help you understand how it all works. They also won't want to dedicate massive amounts of time to implement so make it dead simple for potential partners to serve your data. All you need is one small break to boost your confidence.

i'll have to agree with SHOwnsYou.

My first impression is not "Wow!". Your website design doesn't have that wow factor with it's design. i would highly recommend either getting a design to do some work for you or download a nice design from themeforest.

also there is no way i would pay any money to find an "itenary" because as mentioned below i can just go on google and search for "what to do in xyz?" and pick and choose the ones i like. so personally i would make it free, redo the design and try and make money from the advertisement. maybe down the road you can make deals with certain locations to add them in your itenary for a fee? sell tickets on your site for those locations and keep a commission? either way, charging for an itenary when anyone can just do a google search for it doesn't make sense to me.

$5 isn't much if you are able to demonstrate more value - example: personal safety - what are the areas to avoid? where can you find free water fountains? where are the best spots for a cheap meal along the route? You might be able to raise your revenue mix if you had sponsored content.

Have you tried promoting on Adwords, go for long tail keywords, optimize, optimize, optimize? Have you done A/B testing on your landing pages? Have you thought about installing an affiliate program?

We have done many tests with Adwords - our margins are tiny, and adwords doesn't seem to work for us. We are still testing this, but we are not even close - we are many, many miles away. I'm sure we are missing something with adwords, but we have tried a lot, but still not succeeded.

We have a very basic discount/promo system, but building an affiliate system takes time, and we haven't had any requests for it, so it is not at the top of our roadmap.

I travel a lot and wouldn't use this. Shanghai costs $5 and I don't have any idea what might be in there. My travel book was $15 and already has itineraries for most popular cities in China.

persistence. a better UI. and community feeling - invite users to signup for itinerary authors - and have a subsection of such 'community written' itineraries at a reduced rate. authors get a %. that would ^ word of mouth among travel and expat forums, blogs, social.

Thanks for the suggestions. We are currently giving our itinerary authors 75% of the sales - and that has got the word out a bit (just not enough I guess).

Trying to build a social community is something we should possibly try, but it will take a lot of time - and we weren't convinced it would catch on.