Startup challenge: The right audience and finding ambassadors

How do you find, define and create space for the right audience that wants your product or service? What initiatives would you recommend to turn followers into fans who absolute adore what you do (ambassadors).

The intention of this topic is to learn and teach on making that happen.

The startup I’m currently co-creating offers alternative education and travel programs for remote workers (digital nomads), students, business owners, entrepreneurs, people in sabbaticals and travelers who want to see a country through the eyes of locals and learn from locals.

About six months ago we had a great brainstorming session with people of the Starting Bloc community in New Orleans. They advised us to find ambassadors who would be(come) enthusiastic fans of what our startup is offering. The idea is right now launched as an Ambassador Program.

We incentivize joining the program through a referral program (if you refer 1 participant, you gain 100 USD) and a work-exchange (5 hours a week) to reduce the program costs up to 10%.

As a startup in the travel industry we also offer that ambassadors could help us creating per-country itineraries (places to go, sleep, eat, activities) for upcoming countries or connecting with locals in the upcoming countries.

Since we are currently two people being the core team, we also offer the ambassador to help us in our respective working fields (design in my area, networking in the field of my partner).

So an ambassador can also write posts for our blog, help us with social media and other fields of marketing, help us scouting and interviewing applicants.

Education (learning, teaching) is in the core of our business, therefore an ambassador can also help us creating more online-learning videos (of countries we visit and/or specific aspect of a country).

For more context of what we’re doing, please read about the Ambassador Program in our blog: http://beonboard.org/blog/2016/ambassador-program/