- I strongly believe pitch competitions are negatively correlated with success because they bias for ideas that are easy to validate which means there’s probably a non-obvious reason it hasn’t been done already.
In this case, OP is working on something in the travel space which is notoriously a startup tarpit because customer acquisition costs end up killing most ideas.
You can’t meaningfully affect frequency of usage via your actions and the vast majority of the audience travels infrequently enough that they forget your tool exists the next time they travel.
Also, if you’re serving outbound, you need to bizdev a meaningful amount of the globe to first gain utility. If you’re serving inbound, the customer acquisition generally only happens late in the user journey and is expensive/time consuming to access.
There are still successes in the travel space but the odds are stacked against you.
- "Gym access, comfortable accommodations, sightseeing, custom meal plans"
This is a bog standard travel package. So many of these exist and they are not difficult to produce.
Selling them (really) successfully usually revolves around some pre-existing brand tied to celebrities, authors, books that connect with the destination or theme.
- Yeah of course we did not reinvent the wheel, but from our personal experiences, user interviews and searches this is not present at the moment in the Italian market. > "Gym access, comfortable accommodations, sightseeing, custom meal plans" These are general descriptions as we are in the steps of finishing the program of the first trip offered.
I'll update the article once we defined the program better. We have a marketing expert to take care about the promotion and positioning, that is not my area of expertise. I'll forward the advice to him. thank you, if you have any other advice please feel free to comment. Any piece of feedback can be very useful in this step.
- Thank you for the information. If you have any other advice please tell me I'm very grateful for any advice
We're aware that the small validation we were able to do during the weekeend so now we are trying to validate it really by organising a real trip in September.
We are trying to bootstrap it at the moment and count on our network of friends, Clients (the main founder is a personal trainer) and people that expressed interest initially. we count on organizing the first 2-3 trips to be understand if the idea makes sense to continue or not. we also aim to understand the difficulties with this 2 initial trips to perfect the formula for the trip and find difficulties.
We are not building a tool, but are trying to organize group trips to sell to clients.
We are aware of the high cost of user acquisition too so we have a marketing person in the team. And we aim to try building a community long term with old trip participants and interested people.
We also want to give a healthy/fitness spin to the trip so people will be able to attend the gym or do athletic activities (not my knowledge domain, I bring the outside view to the team by not being in the fitness niche).
- If you want my personal opinion, it is too a niche for being a successful "startup" business.
Like imagine if I add to your pitch "trips for people that like ... And to have a bottle of ketchup on lunch tables and that like hotels name starting with b or k".
Probably ok for a small modest local travel agency but not more.
I would see more success as a "sport and leisure group trips travel" agency but I guess that there are few other competitors in the field.
- Probably I explained myself badly due to English not being my first language. >sport and leisure group trips travel This is basically what we want to build. Organize trips that let you do sport, visit new places and if needed continue your specific implementation (for example finding your supplements and incredients in the apartment already). all of this while being with 8 or 7 strangers and 1 or 2 coordinators for the group
- > are trying to organize group trips to sell to clients.
You might as well be saying "we are trying to make movies to sell tickets".
Organising group tours as such is easy, but the value is in the creative input that engages and inspires possible clients. Destination, people - both guides and participants, activities, materials are all part of this. It can't be "tested" just as two movies with the same synopsis can be completely different.
- You can totally see my english is not the best.
> Organising group tours as such is easy, but the value is in the creative input that engages and inspires possible clients. Destination, people - both guides and participants, activities, materials are all part of this. It can't be "tested" just as two movies with the same synopsis can be completely different.
Thank you for this input. I agree with you that the experience is the most important part. We are preparing the first trip and will try to keep this in mind too. We want people to go back home at the end with great memories and having met new friends. We know we can't guarantee this to all but we'll try to insert activities and occasions to create community (probably not the best term to describe it). The biggest success for us will be if people go back home with 7/8 new friends.
- Success isn’t really the point. These competitions are a fun way to meet other people with entrepreneurial interest. You can work together in a team to build something quick together and if you like them you can keep in touch and maybe do something more serious later on. Most ideas at these weekends will be undercooked, and will need a few non-obvious pivots to be viable businesses.
- an economist sees a 20 dollar note on the floor. Doesn't pick it up. If it was there, someone would have picked it up already.
- scientist has heard this so many times in the past he decides to test its validity. He drops 20 dollars in front of economist. Economist takes the 20.
Scientist: Damn it, now I'm out 20 dollars!
- I went to a startup weekend maybe 9-10 years ago. It was a lot of fun. I didn't pick the best idea to work on, just the funnest sounding. Ended up with a small team (3 of us total) and we we're one of the only ones to actually have a good demo. I try to do some kind of hackfest every year now.
There is just something magical about working on something fun and pulling an all nighter.
- Yeah, it was my first weekend and I went there just with the objective of having fun and do something different but ended up going to this idea because the one presenting it had a huge charisma when presenting it and captured my interest. Apart from this team i met some interesting people and I hope to keep in contact with some of them too.
The area where I live doesn't have an active tech community but it's starting to improve thanks to some communities meetups and similar events and the main attraction of this events is the ability to meet friends in tech or interesting fields like marketing.
I didn't have the energy to pull a all nighter so I went back home at 1 am, but some members did exactly that to finish the pitch for sunday.
- Great attitude. You can’t know what is good at that time scale; may as well just pick something that resonates and have fun building!
- A few weeks ago, I participated in a startup competition in Italy. Over a single weekend, my team had to develop a startup idea, validate it, and pitch it against other teams. In this article, I’ll share our experience and the key lessons that led us to victory
- There‘s a typo in your photo caption: wining instead of winning
- Thank you very much for pointing that out for me, I corrected it, cache permitting it should be live in the next 5 minutes
- is there a link to the competition results page?
- My friends sent me this link with a article from one of the organizers It's in italian so you may need a translation service. you can find the pitch for the top 3 ideas there: https://ltomantova.it/2025/03/31/successo-seconda-edizione-s...
- Hi, not that I'm aware of it. It was only the second time they holded this event in a smaller town in Italy (Mantova) so it's a bit less organized on that side.
- That's is an interesting niche. I wonder if it is a lifestyle business or there is real potential for growth.
- We aim to offer trips to people caring about their lifestyle, think going to the gym, or being careful about what they eat. we want them to be able to meet like minded people and fun around people with similar interests. Our fist founder is a personal trainer so we have his experience on that regard and we aim at this gym niche to differentiate from other group trips organizers in Italy or Europe.
- Thanks. I was asking more is this going to be a small business or do you see a 10M+ business?
- Ahh. I don't know if you're talking about revenue or clients count. I'll presume you mean revenue. I personally don't think that kind of scale can be reached in the the first 4 or 5 years, of the company. We want to go the bootstrap way at least in the beginning until we manage to create a process and find the issues that may arrive. But after that, if we are able to execute and keep growing, I think it can be achievable as that niche is very big in Italy and later Europe. we definitely want to expand out of italy after we managed to iron out the process in the Italian market first.
- insane how much just showing up to these weekends opens up, i always end up meeting cool people and getting new ideas
- Me too! I went there for the same reason and met some interesting people. I also had great conversations with others.
Personally, I’m very introverted, especially around people I don’t know. But talking to those in the same field or about shared interests feels different. Even though I’m shy and introverted, I was still able to have long conversations about these topics.
- >>> The first lesson we learned was that every great startup idea must solve a real problem.
Yeah this is just wrong.
You’ll hear it all the time everywhere but it’s still wrong.
Your startup does not NEED to solve a problem.
Unless of course you want to play word games and twist everything in life in terms of it being a problem.
- Sorry for the delay, I didn't see your comment. the idea behind this logic is that, if you solve a real problem and do it well marketing will be a lot easier and you won't have to spend millions on marketing if you don't want it.
- > Your startup does not NEED to solve a problem.
A lot of startups offer the solution to problems that people don't actually have... And then (through marketing) make people feel the problem.
46 points by danielpetrica 3 days ago | 29 comments