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How should we promote it?

4 points by manasnutcase ↗ HN
Hey Guys, Heres our startup - Mingle Trips - http://www.mingletrips.com . It is for single travelers to meet other travelers/locals while traveling. All sorts of feedback is welcome. Especially, ideas on promoting it. Thanks. Manas

12 comments

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tstegart
How are you promoting it so far?
manasnutcase
I did some basic FB Advertizing and also reached out to bloggers - some of whom have written about us. I also spammed some travel sites a bit :D and posted on CL and various free online classifieds.
tstegart
How well did the advertising work? Was it worth it in your opinion?
manasnutcase
I think FB Advertizing was awesome. It is expensive for USA/Europe but you can target Asia for less than 10 cents/click. We were converting close to 30%. So it wasnt bad at all. But the problem with Mingle Trips is that it is not viral. so I could only get people as long as I paid for it. That was not a great model for a bootstrapped startup. Also, it works much better than listing on Craigs List since you get much fewer perverts. From CL, etc, we were regularly getting prostitutes and guys who only wanted to get laid and were pretty crude. This may not be the general trend. It is only my limited experience.
sebandr
this one's easy - depending on your budget (I'm assuming you have almost none but one never knows): Advertise in travel magazines, hit up some of the travel agencies that cater to your demographic, call some of the travel apps and website services to partner, hit up all the blogs in your space, combine that with a press release targeting the industry publications and reviewers ( it's actually pretty cheap to do - check out Marketwire or others like it). I'd probably also give some of the dating websites a shot - you might get some traction from sites that cater to singles and travel that way. Try the vacation clubs too - many of these cater to singles also - could offer them co-branding opportunities.

Given your demographic I'd also post in University/ College sites. When it comes to hostels/ bed and breakfasts, you can probably contact some of the industry organizations to get lists and partnership or advertising opportunities - and of course call up hostels in some of the bigger cities to have them put up a notice for you. Get a list of journalists that write for travel sites and magazines and send them an intro email - maybe you'll get lucky and be picked up by one or two, offer an exclusive interview if they pick it up ( and stick with your promise).

All of this is legwork, but (except for the advertising) it's pretty cheap to do - just a lot of salesmanship - which is laborious but I figure you have more enthusiasm than money.

Hope that helps - good luck!

manasnutcase
Thats right. I do have more enthusiasm than money :) Thanks. I have reached out to bloggers on Linked in and gotten them to check out the site and recommend to their readers. I also contacted hostels in Europe but they didnt seem much interested so far. I will send many more mails now and see what converts. Thanks
dlf
Reach out to known travel blogs with a well drafted summary of what you offer. Attach some promotion to it. If you plan to charge, than offer a discount to readers with a code that references the website that is blogging about you. If you do not charge users, than offer private beta access to the first n readers to sign up with that invite code.

There's a pretty big chicken and egg problem with this, in that to make it useful you need a lot of users in each travel destination to make this work. If you're active on CouchSurfing, I would try to find locals in popular travel locations who would be interested in giving it a try, or maybe work out referrals with hostels to promote your site locally in exchange for promoting their hostels on your site. For example, for every 100 users they refer, they get 1 week of free advertising. You might even work with Hostel World to drive referral traffic to them with the hostels you've made agreements with in exchange for some free advertising on their site in a similar manner.

sixQuarks
How did you get 500 facebook likes?
manasnutcase
I did some basic FB Advertizing and also reached out to bloggers - some of whom have written about us. I also spammed some travel sites a bit :D So we have around 6k users and 500 fb likes so far. Thanks