Very Good Trippiece
In a nutshell, Trippiece can be summarised with two simple points:
- Social Travel Planning Platform
- It's a platform that allows users to share their travel plan and plan their trips with like-minded people
- User Oriented Tours
- What's special are that the travel tours found on Trippiece focuses more on traveler's initiatives, rather than the kind of tours that agencies would want to sell
They have beliefs on two important aspects
- Tour Agencies are Unaware of Market Demands
- They believe that tour agencies are usually unaware of what their customers want due to the varied demands and interesting. As such, there's a lake of service or product that allows people to visit various new places or find new activities with people that have similar interests.
- Connect People with SAME INTEREST through Travel Trips
- To trippiece, despite having 7 billion people with different personalities in the world, there are still people with similar hobbies and interests. As long as such similar hobbies and interest exist, Trippiece wants to connect people through these travel trips.
- They want to create small little worlds with new found friendships through the love for the same hobbies and interests.
While we have not had the chance to meet with the CEO/Founder of Trippiece, we managed to conduct a little research on him, Ian Ishida.
Ian Ishida's details would be broken down into 3 pointers:
- Ian's Career History
- What Got Ian Started with Trippiece?
- Ian's Words of Wisdom
There are various reasons but here are the top 2 core ones that triggered us to select TRIPPIECE to learn more from:
- Competitive Industry
- FIrstly, we are very amazed by Trippiece's stunning results of garnering 50,000 users despite huge competition from various travel related websites from abroad and locally (e.g. Gogobot)
- Expansion Plans to Singapore!
- In addition, Trippiece had also set up their company in Singapore at Purvis Street, as part of their overseas expansion plan! We would certainly want to hear more on "Why Singapore" and their plans!
Trippiece has one of the most interesting business model (at least to us).
In a nutshell, when a trip has more than 5 participants, Trippiece would help to link their partnering tour agencies to these participants. Trippiece would then, take a small 10% commission cut from the transaction made between the participants and tour agency. The more users they recruit, the more travel itinerary they would have, the more opportunities they have to earn a 10% commission from tour agencies - it's amazing!
Jieting, pls update with revised business model
One of their biggest competitors with such similar models, as mentioned by various websites is none other than Gogobot. Their difference is summarised in the table below:
As a whole, Trippiece did an amazing job on the entire concept of a Social Travel Planning. It's really hard to pinpoint any flaws in the system, much less offer recommendations. However, here are some that we felt they could consider in their pipeline.
They are broken down into two segments:
- Increasing Exposure & User Base
- Some New Features!
- Global Exposure
- It's great to hear that Trippiece had taken international expansion into consideration by setting up their first overseas company in Singapore. To begin, Trippiece can look at establishing their presence in a country per region, for example Italy, for the European Region.
- Consider a Wider Content Database
- Currently, Trippiece contents are geared towards Japan with very little content from other countries. To attract more users from different countries, Trippiece may want to consider a wider content database to include recommendations on activities or location from more countries.
- Tap into More Handheld Device Market!
- Today, everyone is armed with a smart phone. By having their application readily avaqilable on both Android and iOS devices from various countries would definitely increase their exposure and user base of Trippiece!
All in all, we're really looking forward to visiting Wantedly depsite Akiko Naka's absence. Learning how the entire organisation operates with as little as a 10-men team amazes us.
If there are any questions you would like us to raise to Wantedly's team, do let us know. Nozomi would be glad to entertain our questions! Oh well, provided we do not tick her off prior to our trip :)
