Journy · B2C · trip planning service
Charge $6 a day for trip planning aimed at tech-savvy millennials
Too cheap to live on or to trust; 80% of revenue came from boomers
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What they did
Launched Journy targeting tech-savvy millennials, driven by a mission to democratize luxury travel planning, and charged $6 per trip day for planning. Later pricing was a flat $25 or $50 per day.
What happened
$6/day was not enough to sustain a profitable business and too cheap for anyone to believe it was good. Once the business took off, 80% of revenue came from the 20% of customers who were baby boomers paying $1,000+ per trip; the founder says she would have seen that segment sooner if she had been curious rather than attached to her thesis.
- Stage
- early
“I charged people $6 a day for travel planning, which is like not enough money to sustain a profitable business, and um also too cheap for anyone to believe that it was good, and I totally undersold it, right?”
“When my business started taking off, 80% of my revenue was coming from the 20% of my customers who were baby boomers paying $1,000+ per trip.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Journy: Pitch investors before you have a working growth engine180 rejections over about 6 months
- Journy: Pack nine investor meetings into two days in one citySeed round closed in 2 days with three term sheets
- Journy: Spend heavily on marketing and press coverage early onDidn't work; founder calls it wasted money, no details given
- Journy: Pivot to business customers, local trips and online experiences during COVIDNothing worked; couldn't raise more money either
- Journy: Use one buyer's offer to pull in rival bids, then return to your favoritePreferred buyer agreed to pay double its first offer
- Sell $19 PDF travel guides from a landing page before building the app$3,000 in sales in the first month
- The Evolved Founder: Post founder videos on Instagram about your journey and expertise20K+ followers from 26 posts; one video drove 500K views, 2,000+ sign-ups
- The Evolved Founder: Test two hooks as Instagram trial reels, then post the winner to your feedWinning hook hit ~50K views vs 500; ~3,000 new followers in a day
- The Evolved Founder: Have Claude interview you to write scripts, then film five videos at onceLets her post alongside a full-time job with no editor; no numbers
- Use round prices like $19.99 or $29.99, not $22.99Round prices won in a community member's A/B test; no numbers
- Label the paywall button 'Start free trial' on Android and 'Continue' on iPhoneBeat 'Subscribe' in a community member's A/B test; no numbers
- Offer phone cleaner apps as a weekly plan with a 3-day trialHost says weekly tends to win across cleaner apps he's worked with; no numbers
- Put the year, 'New' and a clean-up message on an Android cleaner iconHost says these icon tricks have worked before; no numbers