STARTUP STAGE: Landng offers bookable travel itineraries from content creators

Landng

Landng provides a database of customizable itineraries to help users discover, share and activate travel plans curated by a community of creators, travelers and brands. 

The company is launching in August and says it already has a wait list of 1,000-plus travelers, 60 creators with a combined audience of 5 million on social media and 15 letters of intent signed with brands and tourism boards.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Landng is an online platform that turns travel inspiration into trip plans. We help travelers take action on inspiration through social itineraries, while helping creators monetize their travel content. What Spotify has done for music discovery, we will do for travel discovery.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Landng is a content discovery engine that gives you access to thousands of itineraries and experiences from creators all over the world. Our solution bridges the gap from content discovery to actionable itineraries thanks to Landng's global itinerary library and AI-powered personalized recommendations. Our database of customizable itineraries allows users to discover, share and activate itineraries on-the-go, curated by our community of creators, travelers and brands. 

Our primary technical innovation is the "social itinerary." Allowing users to share itineraries via Landng's online community and personalize other users' itineraries into their own is a new innovation in the travel technology space for the consumer. The personalization of our itinerary recommendations to users is powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. We've also introduced new marketing KPIs for travel creators and brands for the itinerary content format including the Itinerary Save (engagement), Itineraries Customized (deep engagement), Itineraries Activated (conversion/ traffic to location - measuring how many people are going to the locations creators and travel brands recommend).

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

• Strength: We are aggregating the largest community of local micro-influencers in the world, leveraging machine learning and AI to power personalized itinerary recommendations, delivering a streamlined inspiration to booking process for travelers. We will be a timely technological tool to use instead of generic legacy solutions that solve a small portion of a complex problem that needs solving all at once.
• Weaknesses: Early stage startup with limited funding to scale product. 
• Opportunities: We see partnership opportunities with inspiration and local experience players including Google, Pinterest, TikTok, Meta and Airbnb. Travelers will pay a subscription fee for an elevated experience in Landng including a vetted exclusive library of quality itinerary content and ad-free experience. Brands and tourism boards will sponsor itineraries and activities on Landng as location-based native ads to reach their target audiences - a new form of experiential marketing. 
• Threats: If bigger players (such as the ones we’re targeting for partnerships) were to adopt our technology and approach as their own. 

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

One in three travelers turn to social media for travel inspiration. People are creating Pinterest boards and gathering TikTok saves. But, unlike other content types, people cannot shop travel inspiration because of its inherent complexity.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

We have a wait list of 1,000-plus travelers, 60 creators with a combined audience of 5 million on social media and 15 letters of intent signed with brands and tourism boards. Landng is launching August 2023, and we will slowly onboard our users and future customers. Our acquisition strategy: 

• Word of mouth – creators and partners: We will use our network of creators and brand partners to drive the awareness and virality of their social itineraries. 
• Paid: We will launch campaigns on TikTok and Instagram leveraging creator user-generated content and creator collaborations to drive sign-ups. 
• SEO: We will optimize the search-ability of our homepage and aggregate itinerary content to rank highly for travel queries in key markets and all travel niches. 

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

We have analyzed market conditions:

• Behavior: Nearly 1 in 3 travelers turn to social media for holiday inspiration; Gen Z and millennials travel more than any other group - five trips per year.
• Cost: Low-cost of air travel is boosting the tourism industry. 
• State of work: Remote work is giving people more flexibility to travel.
• Post-COVID: With revenge travel on the rise, people are traveling more, and more often. 
• AI: Advancements in large language models and artificial general intelligence will power solutions based on personal preference. 
• Validation: We have conducted hundreds of discovery sessions across our user and customer segments (travelers, creators and brands/ businesses) and completed idea validation via a social media campaign on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest while in our GAN incubator in 2022. Our wait list of travelers and creators and letters of intent also validates the need for Landng's solution.

How and when will you make money?

• Freemium: Travelers will pay a subscription fee for an elevated experience in Landng including a vetted exclusive library of quality itinerary content and ad-free experience. 
• Advertising: Brands and tourism boards will sponsor itineraries and activities on Landng as location-based native ads to reach their target audiences - a new form of experiential marketing.
• Our plan for early revenue 2023-2025: Paid pilots for sponsored posts with travel brands (e.g. Accor hotel in Paris itinerary promoted in all Paris related searches). Also paid brand/ hotel/ tourism board collaborations for content and influencer marketing (e.g. Visit California itinerary collaborations with Landng country pages for optimized promotion, and creator/influencer content and collaboration strategy + execution).
• Confirmed pilots: Content partners include UNESCO, Hawai’i Tourism Authority and HomeExchange; Pilot Ad Customers include Orient Express, Clase Azul, Accor and Club Med. 
• Strategic advisers (supporting customer acquisition): Meta, Air France, Accor, Omnicom, Google, Microsoft. 

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Devon Keakulina DeAngelo (CEO) is a digital content and community strategist with 11-plus years of experience in social media management for global brands and agencies and a deep understanding of Pacific, North American and EU markets. Nacera Belal (COO) is a product manager with 11-plus years of experience across startups, agencies and fortune 500 corporations with a masters in international management specializing in sustainability systems. 

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

The founding team are both diverse female founders (Native Hawaiian, Korean and Algerian). We also uphold our company pillars of diversity, privacy, accessibility, socio-cultural sustainability, environmental sustainability and well-being ethics through everything we do. We work with partners to share content that travelers can use to learn about each of these objectives and inspire their travel plans. Our current partnerships include UNESCO, Hawai'i Visitors and Convention Bureau - in partnership with the Hawai'i Tourism Authority, and Willeasy (a travel accessibility API platform). 

Our owned content strategy champions the social and economic sustainability of local communities and partners with diverse cultural advocates and authorities to share knowledge with travelers about the cultures they're visiting before they take the trip. One of our focuses is to help people through cultural education, while also encouraging empathy, curiosity and openness to their exploration through our community guidelines, enabling travelers to show up as their best selves in their host community. To action this pre-MVP launch, we also partnered with Logictry, in partnership with the U.N. and World Logic Day, helping people learn "how to be a conscious traveler," focusing on environmental and social sustainability for travelers. 

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Our biggest challenge has been raising capital as we've had no opt-in from traditional investors. We've raised just enough through friends and family to build our MVP and get to market ($220,000), a bridge investment from an accredited angel investor ($200,000) and have significant traction for our early stage (including being a shortlisted startup at Web Summit 2022), but will require additional funding to iterate in product development to scale our solution.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

We don’t view ourselves as solely a travel startup. We are a media company that’s innovating for travelers, creators and travel brands in a way that has not been done before. A lot of travel startups fail because of their revenue play - they focus on charging the consumer too early or rely on affiliates. We will be working with travel brands and tourism boards via advertising, relying on neither the consumer or affiliates to generate early stage revenue, allowing us to invest in scaling our solution for the traveler without charging the traveler for this service or requiring affiliate revenue to support it. No other player is doing this and we believe this is how we will win. 

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

We will be revenue generating with 30,000 users and growing. We will have completed pilots for the Sponsored Itinerary location based ad format with five brand and tourism board partners, validating our product and shifting into larger annual budgets to reach travelers summer 2024. 

What is your end-game (going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)?

We plan to be acquired by a strategic industry player within the next five years. We estimate our valuation will be at least $100 million at the time of acquisition resulting in a 10x return for our investors in our pre-seed round launching September 2023.