A while ago, I was working for a company in Israel while also being a digital nomad in Thailand.
I spent a lot of time there was kind obsessed with it.
For those of you who don’t know, A digital nomad is a person who travels the world while working remotely.
If you want to know more about it, leave a comment, and I will make another video for it.

Like every passionate entrepreneur, I was looking for problems to solve.

That’s where Thai Tours was born.

I wanted to disrupt the Thai market of traveling, Making everything digital.

So, I went into a new adventure without too much thinking of market research to create the first app for booking tours online. 

It was a huge failure, so let’s get into the details.

The first problem was that I didn’t do enough research and I haven’t interviewed any tourists.

I thought people could save time by booking tours with an app.
That was a big assumption since I have never talked to any tourists.

Maybe they like the idea of going around talking to real people about tours and booking physically at the stand

The second problem was the fact people needed to download an App.
Downloading an app for one-time use is an awful way to sell.
It increases friction in user acquisition and makes it hard to sell.
When I just started, I looked in the app store to check for applications for booking tours in Thailand and couldn’t find any, so my thinking was if something doesn’t exist, that open space for me. But I was wrong.

The third problem was that I should have started doing B2B and not B2C; let me explain.
I started by collaborating with 1 agency and selling tours myself.
Every business is worth nothing without a user base and a way to spread your word out there. You should find strong marketing channels for your product, which can be PPC, SEO, Affiliate marketing, and so on. After you have all that, you need branding, reviews, and so on. That’s something hard when starting a B2C business.

If I went B2B and collaborated with all the local businesses in Thailand, I would not need hard marketing. I could focus on selling my app to a local business that already has a marketing channel.

The fourth problem was my customer support. There are hundreds of tours out there, and if you offer live customer support and somebody asks you about a tour, you should answer immediately. They will not wait for you. But I didn’t have the answers, and I needed to contact the agency all the time. And as you can guess, they were not that responsive, and I never was able to give customer support on time.

The fifth problem, I used the wrong channel for marketing.
I went directly into PPC because it’s fast, and many people do it, so why not. But this channel has some problems.
1). Too much competition.
2). People are not stupid; they don’t just buy the will google you, and without proper SEO, they will understand that you don’t have a brand very quickly.
3). PPC is super expensive, and without putting in a decent amount of money, it will not work.

So what should I have done? Contact hotels, restaurants, and so on, offer them an affiliate program of selling my tours. That would be a lot easier.

The last problem was that I started too big.
I went on an adventure of 4 months, developing the app, writing content without talking to one customer, or selling anything.

When something is too big, it’s tough to be dynamic, and I couldn’t just pivot to another product, So I built more and more features on top of something that doesn’t work.

On Linvo, we did something different, we released the product with almost 0 features, and we got a lot of feedback that helped us grow the product. Read the book lean startup.

In the end, covid-19 killed my product, and for the best, I had more time to read a learn how to do things better.

However, I am still eager to go back and try the new B2B model.

Do you think I will have better luck this time?
Do you think I missed something? Please let me know in the comments below.
Thank you and goodbye.