Why a Kickstarter – and why now? When we started VoiceMap, we struggled to retain customers because we didn’t cover enough destinations. They might have a great experience in London or Singapore or Cape Town, but when they took their next trip somewhere else, VoiceMap had nothing to offer them.
Even now with close to 2,000 tours globally, covering nearly 600 destinations, most of our returning customers only do two or three tours a year. There are exceptions – including a surprising number of listeners who have done more than 50 tours – but we’re particularly interested in a cohort of curious locals that do tours regularly, close to home.
Next year, we’re going to introduce a subscription option for them – but it’s tricky to just bolt it onto our existing product. We’re growing well by selling one tour at a time, and subscriptions aren’t intended as a replacement for our current business model, listeners will still be able to purchase tours individually as they do now.
Crowdfunding is the perfect first step. It’s the best kind of survey, because you take payment instead of just collecting opinions. It also has the potential to reach well beyond VoiceMap’s existing user base.
We’ve chosen to focus our campaign on the UK. Its size makes the challenge of really scaling up manageable – compared to the US, at least – and while we already have 330 tours there, we see an opportunity to do so much more. We’re also going to develop a set of community features in the app, including a way for listeners to request and vote on new tours.
Find out more and back the campaign at voicemap.me/kickstarter