The TravelMuse launch dilemma - content first vs tool first

First a bit of background….. TravelMuse are a new content focussed travel website. Maybe you could call them an online travel agent but I think that may be a bit of a stretch (at the moment) because their booking engine is provided by Travelocity.

I first wrote about them in June (4 months ago) where I opined about having 16 staff listed on their website…. only one of whom had a travel industry background. [See original post]. It was pointed out that other travel content websites have launched with just 2-5 staff and have made a great success of it….. and 16 may be difficult to get a ROI from just a monetised content strategy (i.e. advertising - apologies for falling into corporate speak - I have had flu and I am only just recovering)

Anyway, they have now officially launched. They did so by paying upto $18,500 for a slot at the DEMOfall08 conference. If you want to get into the whole “paying to speak at a product launch conference” debate I suggest you head over to this TechCrunch post as that is the best place for it.

Scoble kicked off with some posts about sites highlighted by DEMO - saying they “almost all suck” (see original post) and now followed up with a post about “useful travel web sites“. It wasn’t clear if Scoble actually meant that TravelMuse sucks (as the “almost all” is a neat get out clause from Scoble) - but Travolution have written a post with the title “If TravelMuse sucks then is probably not much hope for hundreds of others“. Indeed.

That is all water under the bridge…… and just gossip that I don’t care much about (today). What interests me is the TravelMuse launch strategy. It is this that I will focus the rest of the post on.

The content vs tools launch strategy dilemma

Say you have a great idea for a travel website. How the heck do you go from “idea” through to multimillion (dollar | sterling | euro) value company?

Taking the working assumption that VC money is being used we conclude the exit has to be a big one (rather than just having a goal of “reach profitability”). That is one of the problems of VC funding - the returns tend to have to be high - and tend to have to be quick. This drives companies to situations where they make bold statements like SqueezeHolidays and their “take significant market share within its first year of business.”

New content sites tend to fall into at least these three categories:

• Destination content - guides, reviews, videos, user generated stuff
• Tools - save your trip, share your trip, reminisce about your trip - indeed - having the word Trip in your company name almost becomes mandatory
• Product content - e.g. meta-search / price comparison - or just “selling product” as a “normal” travel agent would

To be a great online travel website you may need to have a mixture of all three categories of content - but when you launch you probably struggle to know what to focus on first.

The dilemma
Say you have a great idea for a new tool that works with destination content. You need the destination content in order to demonstrate how your tool works but you don’t really want to partner with someone else before you launch as that would require you show your functionality ideas when you are at your weakest. What do you do?

Outcome A
You launch your website as a destination content website. Everyone looks at the content - and there is a collective “so what” - because none of it is unique - it is just the same as everyone else’s. Nothing ground breaking going on. People like me write about how it could have been done with 3 people and a community. Later, you soft launch your tool when no one is really watching. The tool has enough time to mature before the spotlight it turned on it…. and the tool becomes a commercial success.

Outcome B
You launch with your tool first. When you are at your weakest one of your competitors comes along and takes the functionality idea and incorporates it into their own site. You then have nothing unique - and you are left with nothing to show for your hard work. This is what has happed with Dopplr vs TripIt. TripIt built a great tool for data importing from travel booking confirmation emails….. Dopplr took one look at it and thought they would have a bit of that in their site. Because TripIt hadn’t reached any level of consumer penetration - it was preferable for Dopplr to build from scratch than bother with a partnership with TripIt. Doesn’t leave TripIt with much to compete with - except to hope that some other company wants to play catch up with Dopplr - and so would benefit from partnering with or acquiring TripIt…. but that may not be the big exit that TripIt VC were looking for ($1 million from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures).

So what tool are TravelMuse working on?
From what I had previously seen of TravelMuse I had them down as just another destination content travel website. I have to say I wasn’t that excited. The only thing I was really interested in was their name as it is almost the same as this blog!

But today I was trawling through some of the stuff they have announced and there - shining like a little coarse flake of gold in a mountain river - was what TravelMuse could be upto. You see, they are not a destination content travel website after all. That is just a ruse to give them a bit of “runway” so we don’t spot what they are really doing.

The TravelMuse Plan-It! widget is a social bookmarking tool that enables individuals to easily save and share content pages inside their Trips on TravelMuse.com

Their ambition should be to appear on every destination content website…… to learn how to partner with them see their partner page

You then add a great level of functionality to your site that will benefit your users without you having to develop any code at all. Uptake have already seen this and have added it to their site. The Uptake blog specifically says they did have similar functionality planned for their site (and had it in private alpha) - but were happy to incorporate the TravelMuse tool in place of the unlaunched system they were working on. [See Uptake blog post]

So yeah, the TravelMuse site may suck (not sure it does actually - it looks a nice effort). But if so - it is only because they want us to think it sucks so we don’t focus on what they are really doing! Full marks to TravelMuse.

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