5 Crucial Steps to Take before Launching Your Travel Startup

So, you’ve got an idea for your very own travel startup. There really is a whole world of opportunity ahead of you, where you’ll be able to create something that marries your own passion for travel with your entrepreneurial drive.

From tourism apps to platforms that offer solutions for the hospitality industry, to the “travel experiences” marketplace and everything in between, travel startups have lately been creating a lot of buzz in the industry. TechCrunch reports that they’ve raised more than $1 billion in venture capital funding in the past five years, and their momentum certainly isn’t going to be over anytime soon.

Yes, now is a great time to plunge into this adventure, but you know it’s not going to be easy. Putting your plan into action will require patience and plenty of learning along the way. To help you build your idea on solid foundations, we’ve rounded up these crucial tips and steps you need to take before launch.

Scrutinize Every Aspect of Your Business Plan

Any reasonable startup founder out there will tell you to spend a lot, a lot of time on your business plan. For those who’ve found success, a meticulously drafted business plan stood behind their resilience to the challenges they’ve encountered past the planning phase.

Use this time to map out a strategy for your first steps. You want to have a very clear idea of your short and long-term goals and which steps you need to take to reach them. Delve deep into the different aspects of your business plan to have a clear idea of how you’ll execute different phases and operations. For example, it’s a good idea to plan out how exactly you’re going to pitch clients and/or investors.

Consider which operations you’ll need to outsource and which type of people you’ll need for the job. At all stages, don’t underestimate the fact that startups need access to cash. Make sure you have a plan for where you’re going to get that cash from. Whether you’re opting for crowdfunding, alternative lenders, investors or any other available choice, your funding needs to be planned in congruence with the given strategies and operations.

Outline Potential Issues

Most importantly, you want to try and anticipate all the possible bumps on the road ahead. Go over your business plan and strategic road map multiple times and outline where things could possibly go wrong. Then create a plan B and a plan C and try to establish the different outcomes.

Of course, you won’t be able to anticipate all the potential issues and hopefully, you won’t run into many of them. But this kind of meticulous planning won’t leave you exasperated when something doesn’t go according to your plan. This preparations phase is a time to pull all your strategies together and, as suggested, to prepare – so if you’d like, you can take this as an exercise in vigilance to tune your entrepreneurial skills.

Go Beyond Market Research

Needless to say, you’re certainly going to be doing thorough market research when developing your idea. But the way you go about it makes all the difference. To go the extra mile and really tune in to your market, observe your competitor from different perspectives – then ask yourself how those observations translate to your own idea. You want to identify both what your competitor is doing right and what needs improvement. Then, you need to find opportunities in both.

You could end up changing things around for the better so that your startup idea presents a vast improvement on how your competitors are currently doing it. Whatever it is that you’re offering to your target market, remember that it doesn’t necessarily have to be entirely novel and never-before-seen – it just needs to be better than what’s currently available so that they may truly benefit from it.

Simplify and Clarify Your Ideas

This goes hand in hand with the previous statement. Complexity, or simply a lack of clarity, is one of the biggest stumbling rocks when you’re trying to bring an idea to life. Examine your core business idea once again – you know, the very essence of what you’re trying to create here.

Answer the what, why, and how of each goal so that you may simplify it completely. Build all the other aspects and goals of your startup upon that core idea. Find your strongest point and focus on it, discarding the rest. This kind of approach will invite much-needed clarity to your business plan.

Get Networking

You need to get in touch with people who’re taking on the same challenges and people you can learn from. Entrepreneurs thrive on community and mentorship. Attend industry events, talks, and lectures, and seek to build relationships with people from the industry. This will also be crucial to building your team and finding the right people to help you set strong foundations for growing your idea.

When you get to strategic planning and idea testing, you might find yourself taking quite a different direction from that which you’d first anticipated. And that’s okay.

That’s what the pre-launch phase is all about – finding how your product fits into your target consumers’ lives, thinking creatively, and trying to figure out what will actually work. So take your time and have faith in your vision.