Hi guys.
I have a few concerns, perhaps you guys can help me with. =)
I feel that these are fundamental problems we need to solve, to convince anyone that our plan can work.
1. Nature of the company is still basically "match-making"
We find good people on both countries, and match them together. What other value do we add? If not, we are still acting as middlemen. And we know that middlemen are not very useful in this age. I find that it is a one time job. This means that we will never get repeat business from the same customer, since they can contact the Singapore hosts directly after that. Not only that, we will also lose the business of their friends too, since they can recommend their Singapore hosts directly too! They will save on the "unnecessary" expenses. Us.
2. Protecting our business
If our business is simply linking people up, how can we protect ourselves? Can other established companies do better and faster than us? How do we plan to keep our foothold, besides the speed advantage?
Cheers,
Jinrui
3 comments:
In my opinion, firstly, we are not doing a matching but providing a service to the customers. Certain discounts with budget hostels and arrangements to visit events are only possible through our network. Companies like Dell and Ikea also play the part of the middleman.
Plus we hope to develop friendship and close ties with our customers. If they are happy with our service they may even ask their friends to use our service.
have read what ivan said last post. and to this post, agreed. ours starts off not as a matching company but as a "bao ga liao" company that does ur planning for u at a cheap price. this i also feel is our barrier to entry: cheap cheap prices. also, kelvin and i talked about the manpower recruitment today. we'll finetune and let u all know next meeting. still working out some issues.
Hei team,
First thing first. I feel that Jinrui's points on one-time-matchmaking job and the protection of our business are two very valid concerns. Felyna and I had a meeting on Manpower today and we sort of touched a bit on the one-time job issue. We concluded that in order to keep our cost low, we will stick ONLY to tertiary students as our source for manpower, even when we expand our business subsequently. Since this is the case, our tour guides can only host for as long as they are still studying. Once they graduate, they will seek jobs elsewhere because of higherand reliable pay (our pay is seasonal as it is dependent on the number of tourists). Hence, the tourists cannot contact them for service anymore. Moreover, we can sign an agreement with our tour guides to forbid them from attending to any tourists except for those introduced by us, for the entire duration when they are still studying. Such agreement is common. This can solve the problem of one-time job.
As for protection of business, I feel we have one main line of defense: price. Our strategy for big profit is to keep our cost low, price low, and serve a large number of customers. This strategy can at least buy us some time. Once the price of such tourism goes up as a result of maturing industry and growing demand, we will be considerably established with our brand name and network of tour guides at the tertiary institutions. My only concern is this form will mature too fast, before we can establish our brand name. For example budget airline. Within months of introduction of this new way of traveling, the major aviation players have already enter into this market. But I doubt this problem will occur. This form of tourism is unique not just in price, but most importantly, the nature of it. Therefore, it should take some time to mature. What do you all think?
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