Guidefabrik puts QandA service in the hands of tourism websites

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TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring UK-based Guidefabrik, a B2B question-and-answer service.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Guidefabrik is a client-based question and answer platform designed to help organizations better serve visitors by providing accurate, up-to-date answers to relevant questions.

The idea is an evolution of previous projects by co-founders Nicholas Holmes and David Batey – we met in a previous life consulting for a FTSE100 travel firm on the management and technology side respectively and have worked together on startups ever since.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Currently, we’re supporting ourselves through the development phase, although we expect to raise funds in the coming months.

What problem are you trying to solve?

The majority of destination marketers, with shrinking budgets and no in-house programmers, struggle to keep their online presence up to date and relevant.

This means that some offer a substandard online service, forcing visitors to pick up the phone – or worse, causing them to lose interest altogether. It also means they struggle with being visible in the crowded online travel space – the percentage of people visiting DMO websites for trip planning is falling and they don’t rank particularly well with Google.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Guidefabrik is the first implementation of our core product, a hosted question and answer platform which brings frequently asked questions into the internet age.

It ensures that the most accurate, relevant information is available to everybody, all the time.

Setting up a subdomain for a new client (a DMO or CVB, for instance) is simple and takes just a few minutes – we are also currently working on offering easy integration with existing websites (a la Disqus).

As well as being an easy-to-navigate read-only resource, it allows anybody with a Twitter, Facebook or Google account to ask a question, submit an answer and provide feedback (ratings) on the answers of others – ensuring the best answers are the most visible.

Once logged in, users (visitors) can follow questions or topics – allowing a hotel, for instance, to immediately be notified of a new hotel-related question that appears on their local DMO’s Guidefabrik feed.

On our site, suggested questions from related clients can also be displayed – eg. a question from VisitBritain may appear as a “suggested” read on a VisitLondon site.

Clients have additional privileges that allow them control of their subdomain, including the ability to edit homepage copy, edit and delete questions and reassign questions to a specific topic. A list of tourism-related questions can be preloaded into each subdomain to get new clients started.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

We have just entered private beta with some initial partners – at the moment, the product is aimed at internet-savvy small to medium DMOs and CVBs.

As we further improve the product, we envision expanding this group to include major destinations and attractions, before a full launch in Q4 2011.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Yes – we talked to several industry experts and one major online tourism board about the idea while we were still planning. We’ve only just started communication with potential investors.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

We’re still defining this and evaluating our options (the product will be free until our launch) – most likely in the short term will be a freemium subscription model with a monthly charge for enhanced functionality and a guaranteed uptime.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Client-owned: existing sites lack the ownership model which ours uses and are, consequentially, often very untidy.
• Hyperlocal: We believe our clients will want to build a community using their Guidefabrik site, which is far harder using a huge Q&A database. Guidefabrik makes it easy for local businesses to connect with potential visitors.
• Technically flexible: we’ve built using Ruby on Rails so our code is lean and nimble. We’ll be using this to our advantage, experimenting with features as we go through testing.

Weaknesses:

• Dependent on client buy-in and advertising to build user base
• Q&A is a busy market, and some of the players are incredibly well-resourced (ahem, Quora)

Opportunities:

• Scalable: not restricted to travel industry
• Mobile: an app for use at a destination should help to boost our userbase

Threats:

• A well known, well-funded player could launch a similar client-focused solution with relative ease

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Several people warned us that the Q&A market was saturated, and that nobody is likely to be able to catch up with Quora, which is streets ahead of basically everyone out there.

But by focusing on clients and making our product into a customer service solution rather than an all-encompassing knowledge base, we think there’s a gap in the market.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Our product being used by large and small destinations alike to convert enquiries into business. We’ll of course measure on the client base, but – perhaps more importantly – also on how well they (and us) are engaging their respective communities.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.