STARTUP STAGE: Trzmo aims to be a super app for travel

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Trzmo is a super app for frictionless travel replacing 20-plus single-purpose apps. For global travelers, Trzmo provides international roaming at a fraction of the cost with eSIM activation in seconds. Easy duty-free browsing en route with built in price and availability tracking means you arrive with everything you need. Streamline all travel logistics from departure to arrival in a single dashboard: from real-time flight updates, hotel and rideshare details, local time zone and weather information and food recommendations. What's more, Trzmo automatically crafts your personal travel journal when you capture photos and videos in your timeline.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your start-up.

Founder Myank Jain is an avid traveler and over the years has traveled to more than over 40 countries. He experienced many of the time-wasting challenges and stressful frustrations faced by fellow travelers, whether it’s juggling multiple apps, Wi-Fi issues or slow data connection. Currently a smartphone is the most important piece of equipment you carry while traveling. Fast, secure and cost-effective global roaming data is critical with international travel, as otherwise one can be completely disconnected, in an unknown geography. First-generation travel apps are single purpose, and don't integrate with one another, making them unwieldy and their value unrealized. Trzmo is the first app solving these challenges. Trzmo travel app streamlines all travel logistics on a single dashboard: From real-time flight updates to weather conditions to food around you.

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

• Strengths
  • Low customer acquisition cost
  • Unique travel super app replacing 20-plus single purpose apps
  • Wide usability even when you are not traveling, making it sticky
  • All time eSIM data makes it a compelling travel app that users would love to embrace
  • Original concept of duty-free price comparison in a single app
  • Strong team with technical bandwidth and a knowledge-driven advisory board
• Weakness
  • Limited marketing budget
  • While we are a startup with a unique value proposition, we are still new to the market having publicly launched at Phocuswright Europe in 2022
  • We are in the early stages of promoting our brand to the global market and building awareness among our consumers
• Opportunities
  • Pandemic has accelerated the digitization of the travel industry, making connectivity a must for smooth travel
  • Current international roaming is very expensive with large network operators, and Wi-Fi is unsecure/unreliable and spotty.
  • eSIM is a new industry standard
  • Travelers increasingly prefer a super app as compared to single purpose apps
• Threats
  • Competition from established brands of single purpose apps
  • Other travel disruption due to global events, such as global conflicts, pandemics, economic instability

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

Trzmo strongly believes that despite tremendous travel tech innovations, apps have been disjointed and single purpose. Often travelers are overwhelmed with navigating logistics, paying too much, and struggling upon arrival to set up global roaming. To battle the cellular data status quo, Trzmo partnered with Celitech and innovated a solution to provide free international roaming on the spot, which drives adoption for Trzmo and Celitech, while delivering connectivity that will allow travelers to enjoy stress-free travel. Trzmo works closely with an advisory board of travel industry veterans and is forging new partnerships to bring convenience and efficiency to every aspect of travel. Further, TRZMO automatically pulls flight itineraries from your calendar, facilitating trip management without cumbersome and error-prone data entry, all the while notifying you of real-time changes.

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

In the last 12 months we have showcased our product at two travel conferences - Phocuswright Europe in Amsterdam and The Phocuswright Conference in Phoenix. We have forged a partnership with Celitech and they are co-marketing us. We have not spent any money on marketing yet, and most of our users are through word of mouth, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. In addition, we are targeting ITB Berlin in March and plan to participate in the Innovation Launch program at Phocuswright Europe in Barcelona in June. Our free international roaming promotion has been very well received, and we have seen a significant uptick (10X) in our downloads. We are planning to engage a digital marketing company to have Facebook and Google campaigns.

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

During the pandemic, the travel industry accumulated huge pent-up demand for travel and doubled down on much-needed digitization across the board. We at Trzmo spent time understanding and analyzing traveler needs by following analyst reports and reaching out to industry and advisory experts. Conor O'Mahoney, one of our advisory board members, has deep expertise in the travel industry to further guide us. Our technical team has deep knowledge in app development making them the perfect fit to develop a streamlined app with intuitive UX. Trzmo has been in development for the last two years during the pandemic. This gave us an opportunity to evolve by constantly validating with our customers and industry experts as well as continually iterating and testing to further solidify the offering.

This is an ideal time for Trzmo to form high-impact commercial partnerships, target rapid consumer adoption and accelerate growth. Further, we see continually increasing demand for travel as COVID-19 evolves from pandemic to endemic status.

How and when will you make money?

At Trzmo we have multiple strategies in the pipeline to monetize our app:

• Freemium. Keep the Trzmo app free and charge for eSIM data. We get the data at wholesale price and have a markup of 50%. The average price for 1GB of data is about $7 (varies by country). We make $3 per user. Prior to the pandemic, the global air passenger traffic was 4.3 billion (CAGR +6.0%), and according to Expedia, we are getting back to pre-pandemic level. The global roaming tariff market size is estimated to be about $62.7 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow to $75.3 billion by 2028 with CAGR +3.1%. Thus, there is certainly market potential and a substantial TAM.
• Subscription. Charge a monthly or yearly subscription fee for the Trzmo app with free eSIM data for the subscriber. In this case we have an addressable market of 4.3B (CAGR +8.1) jetsetters.
• Lead Generation. Once we have more than 50,000 users, we can also charge lead generation fees from some of our vendors (food, rideshare, duty-free shopping and other booking services). We are already working to integrate event services with lead gen fees.
• Brand placement and ad fees.

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

Trzmo CEO and Founder Myank Jain is a successful and experienced entrepreneur having built iQuest Analytics in 2004. Jain has held leadership positions at Boston area companies, spearheading their high growth prior to founding Trzmo. He has a master’s degree in computer science and is deeply involved in the tech innovation community in Massachusetts. Advisory Board members include Josh Wiess, an angel investor focusing on early stage tech start-ups, and Conor O'Mahoney. Weiss is a member of Hub Angel Investment Group and Launchpad Ventures. He was founder and CEO of Nauticus Networks, which was acquired by SUN in 2004. Prior to Nauticus Networks, Weiss was cofounder and vice president of engineering at Prominent Corporation, which was acquired by Lucent Technologies. O’Mahoney is an advisor, investor and independent board member and a top-performing entrepreneur, with a track record of leading successful product innovation and scaling business. As chief product officer at Klaviyo, he implemented a product-led growth approach that drove a 10X increase in revenues. As chief product officer at SilverRail, he oversaw a 6X increase in revenues leading to acquisition by Expedia Group in 2017. (Note: Expedia Group sold the company back to SilverRail management in 2020.) 

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

We strive to offer a welcoming and inclusive travel experience to all customers and have a diversity and inclusion policy in place to ensure that our travel services are accessible, reliable and safe for everyone. Further, we prioritize diversity and inclusion in our internal business procedures as well, denouncing discrimination, harassment, and bias. Finally, we have recruited a diverse team - based across the globe in Ukraine, Spain, and the United States - that reflects our customer base and are committed to ongoing engagement with and support of our diverse users.

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

Apart from self-funding and working around the clock, an early challenge was testing at the global scale. We had to find ways to get feedback quickly, cheaply, and reliably across different countries, while ensuring the privacy and security of our users. As a bootstrapping company during a worldwide pandemic and period of restricted travel, there were limitations. Beyond that, navigating our customer engagement strategy on a limited marketing budget has introduced some challenges. We are tackling this by looking for new ways to reach and engage audiences without relying too much on traditional marketing methods, thus limiting our burn rate while also driving brand presence.

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

Trzmo meets a genuine customer and industry need in an enormous market by providing international roaming at a fraction of the cost with eSIM activation in seconds to stay connected in over 190-plus countries. Our sophisticated mobile data platform helps customers stay connected without having to navigate complex roaming networks and lengthy contracts. With Trzmo, customers can select the perfect roaming plan for their needs and be up and running in minutes. We are constantly innovating, and with our deep technology background, Trzmo envisions fully automated data entry from geolocation, calendar, email, and phone to eliminate all user errors. We are also unlocking other revenue streams, leveraging the data we receive to help us better understand our customers. Trzmo promises to provide an excellent customer experience and unrivaled value for our customers. We are revolutionizing the way people stay connected around the world.

A year from now, what state do you think your start-up will be in?

Our MVP is built and available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. We have price information on 1.5 million SKUs from duty free shops in over 60 countries and international roaming in 190 countries. We have already forged some great partnerships in place; we will grow as fast as we can acquire customers. Through creative marketing and innovative services, we can have a wider base of happy customers resulting in faster customer acquisition. Lastly, we will be in the process of closing a funding round.

What is your endgame? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

Trzmo will most likely get acquired.