Visiting new places and tourist destinations is one of the most exciting things about traveling, but the accompanying tourist technology can often be outdated or incompatible with your personal travel schedule.
From clunky, inefficient audio equipment to costly guided tours, the very technology that has been designed to make our travels better can often make them worse!
Luckily, today’s guest recognized the tourist industry’s need for a reliable and engaging app and came up with SmartGuide, the world’s most popular digital audio guide platform with an app that turns every smartphone into a personal audio guide.
Allow me to introduce Founder, Jan Doležal…
—
My name is Jan Doležal, and I founded SmartGuide, the world’s most popular digital audio guide platform with an app that turns every smartphone into a personal audio guide.
SmartGuide is a digital guide platform where anyone can publish a digital audio guide for travelers. With the help of geolocation and AI transforming text to speech, it is now possible for destinations, tourist attractions, and travel businesses to create an audio tour in less than an hour.
SmartGuide turns travelers into explorers and helps them avoid crowds, exploring at their own pace.
We are a team of passionate travelers. While traveling, we saw how the local digital guides lacked quality or only existed in outdated offline forms.
We could also see that tourist destinations invest a lot of money to develop their own apps to solve this problem. We wanted to give storytellers an easy tool to share their stories with travelers and also make visiting less popular places enriching.
We started selling the product before we created the first line of code. Once we validated that the proposition was appealing, we asked an outsourced development company to build a minimum viable product.
The app was quite ugly and only worked on Android, and all data was hard-coded, but we could validate it in action with a minimum investment.
I had a great career as a management consultant with McKinsey, and my technical co-founder had a cozy corporate job. When we saw the traction, we decided to take the plunge and quit our jobs. We figured it was easier to throw away the MVP and build proper technology from scratch on solid foundations.
We first built the app with data decoupled in JSON files to get it up and running. Then we built a proper backend for the data.
Once the backend was ready, we built an internal content management system to replace wild scripts for managing content directly on the backend. Then we turned an internal content management system into a public tool that anyone can use to publish amazing digital guides.
The most difficult part of building an audio guide platform is getting it started. Nobody wants to be the first one to download an app with no content. And nobody wants to create content for no audience.
To crack this chicken and egg problem, we first aggregated content for 300 destinations from available sources. Once we had the technology ready, we started offering it to the first destinations to publish their official guides. These destinations promoted SmartGuide to their visitors, which created traffic that encouraged more partners to join.
We also found a small marketing hack. On Google Play, we published anchor apps with guides for individual cities that could have their store listing, relevant images, and optimized SEO.
These apps did nothing but redirect the user to the “main app” which includes all guides. This worked quite well to get initial users on the main app and compensated for the lack of options to promote location-specific content effectively on the app store.
The lifetime value of an end-user is relatively low, especially compared to the high acquisition costs. These are driven by companies like booking.com trying to capture travelers, and it is an uphill battle competing with their performance marketing.
They have higher valued products, so they can invest more in acquisition. All these B2C startups failed to extract higher lifetime value than acquisition costs from the end-users.
Other companies offer white-label apps B2B. This business model can work but lacks explosive growth, and it ignores the fact that travelers don’t want to install a different app for every place they visit.
We make the same B2B sales to let tourist businesses know about our technology through email campaigns, LinkedIn marketing, and some content marketing. But the difference is that we let them bring their visitors on a platform instead of a Whitelabel app.
Travelers prefer to use an app that shows them around hundreds of destinations globally rather than a single-purpose app. So we get free acquisition of end-users as a byproduct of our B2B deals.
If there were only one book I could read in my life, it would be Sapiens by Professor Harari. His 21 lessons for the 21st century would likely follow.
To keep up with current affairs, I like the BBC News Podcast and The Economist.
While most other businesses in travel struggled due to COVID-19, SmartGuide grew 700%. While other travel companies let go, we have more than doubled our team. We have positive unit economics, but we are not profitable yet, as we invest heavily in further development. We have validated the product-market fit, so now we focus on scaling across Europe and globally.
We are excited about the technologies we are about to build next. We have already collected amazing big data about travelers that can help with data-driven destination management.
We plan to build an AI-based recommendation engine that will learn your travel preferences and build custom travel itineraries for you, just like Netflix gives you recommendations on movies to watch.
Giving everyone personalized recommendations will allow us to engage travelers more and at the same time disperse crowds of tourists at top sights, which is the main goal of popular attractions and destinations.
We also believe that the future will be augmented. We have built prototypes of the Augmented Reality guide, and as soon as the technology matures a bit, we will introduce new immersive Augmented Reality guide experiences. This is something paper guides or old-fashioned audio guides can’t even dream of.
It is never too late to become an entrepreneur. If you have a certain passion and challenges that excite you, you are a perfect entrepreneur.
https://www.smart-guide.org/
https://www.facebook.com/SmartGuideApp/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/smart-guide/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/SmartGuideChannel
My mother in law loves to sew.
A few years ago she asked me how to set up an online store.
She wanted to sell fancy throw pillows she was making.
I gave her very basic steps. Enough to get started (I don't know much about ecom).
A few weeks later she showed me her site. It…
Whatever your 2024 goals, hopes, and dreams are.
I hope you make it.
Everyone wants “yes.”
But they don’t wanna pay the price.
100 Nos is the price of one yes.
You can get as many as yeses as you damn well please as long as you’re willing to pay the price.
I was sad to learn that Charlie Munger died today at age 99.
What a life.
He would likely roll his eyes and argue that none of us should be too surprised, based on the actuarial tables, but we’ve lost one of the 20th century’s greatest investors and businessmen.
Chris and I…
