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Flock: Mobile Travel App
Duration
4 weeks
Tools
Figma, Microsoft Excel
Key Skills
Mobile App Prototyping, Entrepreneurship, Finance
Team
Students from the Hochschule der Medien
Background Info
During the Spring 2022, I teamed up with three other international students in our finance and entrepreneurship class at the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart Germany to conceptualize our very own startup business. Considering ourselves to be frequent travelers and lovers of travel, we quickly honed in on a problem that we each experience when traveling: planning. We found common ground with our struggles in preparing organized, cohesive, and overall enjoyable trips.
Meet the Flock Team
Young travelers around Europe struggle with organizing their vacation plans. They know that traveling can be expensive and stressful. While booking transportation and accommodation options can be fairly simple, they also recognize that planning a trip involves much more work. Successful trips require research to be done and reservations to be made in advance. These tasks can be difficult and overwhelming, especially considering how much travel content is available on the internet and social media.
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How might we develop a solution that enables young travelers around Europe to plan organized, low-stress, and enjoyable vacations with their travel mates?
Problem Statement
Surveying young travelers
To better understand the problem, we surveyed a group of 22 young travelers (age 18-28) living in Europe. From this survey, we aimed to identify the key stressors young travelers experience when going on trips. We also hoped to determine whether our platform could be useful to our target demographic.
Our survey helped us narrow down the top three issues young Europeans are budgeting, navigation, and transportation. We therefore felt it was necessary to address these points in our app. We explained this is done in the following section:
Budgeting
Our app will include an explore page where users can filter their feed to show low budget trip recommendations. In addition, the main idea behind Flock is that it enables users to plan their trips ahead, which helps them save money and time while still getting to enjoy the trip of their dreams.
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Navigation
Flock incorporates an itinerary feature that allows users to make plans for their vacation considering the location of the users accommodation and activity plans. Flock also uses AI technology to plan your day based on the location of each activity.
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Transportation
Flock includes a transportation section within the 'Plan Trip' feature. This shows the users transportation plans, including major travel (flights, train etc.), as well as information on city transportation.
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Customer Segments
In this section, we started by creating two customer personas in order to describe and synthesize the key players of our app.
Next, we focused on highlighting on how our app solved the problems of each persona. We created a Value Proposition canvas, which essentially displays how Flock, as a service, offers various gain creators and pain relievers. These go hand in hand with our persona, whose pains, gains, and jobs play an important role in how they might use and experience our app. Lastly, we made an empathy map, which helped us value and empathize with the feelings and circumstances of our target audience.
Value Proposition Canvas
Empathy Map
App Development
In the next stage, we used Figma to create a prototype of a few important flows in the app. These include the onboarding process, the my trip feature, and the discover feature.
Onboarding
My Trip Feature
The My Trip Feature demonstrates how users will view their planned trips. Within each planned trip, users can easily access all the information they need to get ready for their vacation. In the future, we plan to add a flow for users to plan a new trip.
Discover Feature
The discover page recommends destinations and includes a “What’s hot section” that shows destinations that are trending.
Branding Guidelines
For our brand, we wanted to select colors and fonts that exuded a sense of importance and simplicity. We agreed the the navy blue shade would help our company and service stand out, as it is commonly associated with travel and flight. The black and gray shades makes the app feel simple and easy to navigate. The logo, designed by my teammate Emma, demonstrates "Flock" in the form of a simple bird.
Product Market Fit
At this point, we believed it was important to distinguish Flock from other travel planning solutions. We recorded the Total Available Market, Serviceable Available Market, Serviceable Obtainable Market, as well as drafted a competitive landscape chart.
Total Available Market (TAM)
How big would be the worldwide total demand for your product or service if it were the only and infinitely available solution on the market?
95% of surveyed people said that they would like to use a trip planning app for their future trips. We will concentrate in the German market, specifically in Stuttgart since we want to start small and then get bigger.
Serviceable Available Market (SAM)
What proportion of this total demand and what target groups could you serve and reach with your product or service?
We would serve 25% of the total demand. The target groups we would reach would include: youth, travel lovers, students, graduating students, economically independent people, young adults, working adults, friend groups, families, and work colleagues.
Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM)
What proportion of the market can you actually serve with your current business model? E.g. if you only sell online at the beginning, you resign a part of the actually possible demand
We estimate that we serve only a small portion of the demand due to the fact that we will start small and offer our app to people looking to travel to Stuttgart only before offering travel options for other cities within Germany and Europe
Competitive Landscape
The travel industry is a competitive market that is constantly adapting to changes.They all offer features that differentiate themselves since they are all trying to achieve the same goal. Our company offers more features, which ultimately makes us a better choice when it comes to travel planning.
Traction
in this section, we focused on how our company would acquire customers. Using this six step Marketing and Sales Funnel, we were able to brainstorm ways that to get people to take the simple action of downloading Flock. We then discussed the ways that Flock can position itself as more than just a mobile app, but as a social campaign.
Flock can reach more customers through getting involved in spreading the word about the services through classic channels, online channels, as well a through content and viral marketing.
Classic Channels
Exhibitions:
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ITB Berlin. March 7-9, 2023
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BIT Milan. February 12-14, 2023
These exhibitions will help our company to connect with potential clients and investors, raise our brand awareness, help us close deals, and launch our product: our app Flock.
Events: Flock will also take part in following events:
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BTB - Bus. Travel. Business in VIENNA November 8-9, 2022
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7th UNWTO World Forum on Gastronomy Tourism in BRUGES. December 13-15, 2022
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Online Channels
Blogs: Flock would collaborate with well-known travel inspiration bloggers:
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Murad Osmann, @muradosmann – 4.6m followers
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Jack Morris, @doyoutravel – 2.7m followers
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Selena Jacob, @finduslost – 122k followers
Influencers: Flock would also collaborate with traveling influencers:
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@jackmorris, 2.6M followers
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@thebucketlistfamily, 2.6M followers
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These influencers fit our target group, as they are a young travel lovers or members of traveling families
Search Engine Advertising: for this we will take care of the following points:
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Following a Keyword analysis to find which work best for our app: #grouptripplanning #tripinspiration #travelsocialmedia #motivationfortrips. Then, adding fresh content to the website and updating it regularly. And finally, testing our keywords and website performance
Search Engine Optimization: we will take detailed actions in this section
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We will call for action with visual aids and a QR code to download the app, as well as a section with app reviews
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Content and Viral Channels
Content marketing: We will rely on our bloggers and influencers for content creation. Our content creators will get a free subscription so that they will be able to blog their planned trips using Flock. The creators will also share a discount code with their subscribers as an incentive to use the app. This will be a successful strategy since a yearly subscription is only 20€.
Viral marketing: Flock will offer discounts in the premium subscription to the customers that recommend the app to other friends. The app will generate discount codes so they can be used by friends. The social media followers of Flock will also get discounts when sharing and posting their planned trips using the Flock platform.
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Affiliate programs: For this we will affiliate with other planning websites like Tripadvisor, Airbnb, Skyscanner and Hopper. These companies will link Flock in their webpages and will earn a commission for every click received.
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Top Three Channels for Flock
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Viral Marketing; This will benefit us as a company, as it is cost-effective due to the fact that it brings lower advertising costs. It will also give Flock the mainstream media exposure that it needs, and therefore, will bring more brand awareness.
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Social and Display Ads: This gives Flock higher conversion rates and boosts leads to the website. This way of advertising also gives in-depth analytics and enough feedback to improve ourselves. In general, social and display ads will also increase our brand awareness.
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Blogs and Influencers: Influencers will have a bigger reach to out target group, as they will build trust for our brand. They will drive the purchase decisions of their subscribers. Through this, our sales will increase and our content strategy will be enriched.
Business Model Fit
In the last section, we focused on how Flock will generate profits. Using a Growth Motor, we broke this down into three distinct sections, paid subscriptions, paid advertisements and influencer marketing. Next, we estimated our costs as a company, which we then added up and divided by the number of new customer we plan to acquire, in order to obtain customer acquisition cost. Lastly, we calculated our customer churn to estimate the proportion of customers who will continue using our service beyond the first month after downloading the app and potentially purchasing a subscription.
35%
EARNED
Paid Subscriptions
30% of our revenue earned will come from paid subscriptions. This is due to the fact that we only expect around a fifth of all downloaders to purchase a subscription. The subscription is also relatively cheap and will therefore deliver us only a portion of our revenue.
40%
PAID
Paid Advertisements
We expect the majority, 40%, of our revenue to come from paid advertisements. We plan to work with many other travel related companies, who will pay us to display their ads on our app. These ads will only be displayed on the free version of Flock, which most downloaders will be using.
25%
VIRAL
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing will also play an important role in gaining revenue for Flock. We will pay influencers to promote our app through various channels. This will ultimately help us gain brand awareness and bring more people to download our app and purchase our membership.
Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)
Sales Costs:
Employee Salaries:
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Software developer/App developers
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38.000€ per year per worker -> 3 software developers
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Marketing specialist
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39.000€ per worker -> 2 marketing specialists
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€192,000 total
Google Search Advertisement:
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The average benchmark cost per click is 2.32€ -> 10,000 people x 2.32€ per click
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= €23,200
Final Cost for Sales:
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192,000 + 23,200 = 215,200€â€‹
Offline Marketing Costs:
Posters and Billboards
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Digital city light poster in Stuttgart: 99.2€ per day
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20 S-Bahn stops with digital poster (for 2 months) -> 99.2€ x 60 days =5,952€
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17 bus stops with digital poster (for 2 months) -> 99.2 x 60 days = 5.952€
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5 digital billboards in city center (including train station) -> 99.2€ x 90 days = 8.928€
Info Customer Business Cards
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1.000 business cards= 18€
Final Cost for Offline Marketing
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5,952 + 5,952 + 8.928 + 18 = 20,850€
Online Marketing Costs:
Sponsorships with Influencers
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Sponsored Instagram post from an influencer €300
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Sponsored TikTok post from an influencer €500
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15 Influencers to start
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Instagram Total = €4,500
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Tik Tok Total = €7,500
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Total cost = €12,000 for Sponsorships with Influencers
Google Search Advertisement
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3 in 4 europeans plan to travel this summer (according to the European Travel Commission) = 75%
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447.7 million people in the EU x 75% people will travel = 335,775,000 people in the EU will travel.
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We would like to reach 10,000 people to start.
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The average benchmark cost per click is 2.32€ -> 10,000 people x 2.32€ per click = €23,200
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Total cost = €23,000 for Cost of Google search ads to be visible by 10,000 people
Final Cost for Online Marketing
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€12,000 + €23,000 = €35,000
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CAC Result
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Customer Churn
Downloaders (Free Version + Paid Version)
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Total Customers at the start of the first month = 5,000
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Lost Customers after the first month = 1,000
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CCR = 1,000 / 5,000 x 100 = 20%
Subscribers (Paid Version)
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Total Customers at the start of the first month = 1,000
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Lost Customers after the first month = 100
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CCR = 100/ 1,000 x 100 = 10%
Future Enhancements
In the future, we would like to focus on user testing to ensure our product would be purchased and used by our target demographic. In these user testings, we will also identify key errors in our design which can then be implemented. Furthermore, we plan to design a fleshed out app design with complete prototype of all screens.
Lessons Learned
Since it was carried out at the Stuttgart School of Media, this project taught me how to work with a globally diverse group of people. I found this to be an advantage as we each came into the project each with different strengths and knowledge of the business/ app design world. I also learned key finance figures that helped us estimate Flock's potential performance.