Ask HN: What do you think of my startup idea?

I think your biggest problem is going to be vetting the providers and managing your risk/liability. How do you plan to provide/require insurance? How are you going to deal with problems between customers and providers?

What will your vetting program look like when your providers are global?

Worth poking around and understanding if those economics have worked out for them / how this might be different (from a business model perspective)

Also, I think in order to cut down costs for the people who use this service, it'd have to be a group thing. Having a private session by a personal tour guide will be very expensive and extremely niche (ie: the wealthier people) and that, I think, will be your biggest challenge.

I think another approach (which is also on my list of random ideas) is instead of having a personal tour guide, have a person that functions similar to a info kiosk instead.

Example: Say you're a Canadian visiting Malaysia, and the 'host' will be someone that's informed in both Canadian and Malaysian culture and paper work/law. They're the go to person for everything, questions you have, whether it's visa, places to stay/visit/eat at. If you ever run into problems, they can advice the best course of action, etc. Naturally, they'd be well versed in both languages (yours and the country you're visiting). They'll be a number you call if you ever need anything, need a price check, need a cab, etc.

(Regardless, the biggest issue is safety and insurance for a random person selling 'adventures, which you have already identified. Definitely throw a Craiglist up, sell a local adventure that you're confident in taking people on and see how that goes and decide from there. Good luck!)

Do follow the other fellow's advice and try validating your idea on craigslist, couchsurfing, meetup, etc. We don't have a real website yet, but we've surprisingly got some leads through those channels.

You may also look into trying some of the REI trips that sortof do this already.

http://www.vayable.com/

* Select day, say next Sunday.

* Select time, say 11am-4pm

* Select location, say Sydney CBD

* Select type of activity, say both sightseeing and food, or anything.

* Enter amount of money, say $200 for two adults.

* Click 'search' and then browse the things I could do there at this time spending that much money.

For example: harbour cruise, or cruise and a lunch in a near-by restaurant, or bowling and pizza in a near-by cafe, etc... Also with comments for these activities, links to venue's websites, easy to print-out maps, etc...

The folks who are qualified to run adventures probably do exactly that, professionally, and so are already listed in the yellow pages, have their fliers in the local tourist offices, may be listed (and reviewed) on the Lonely Planet site, etc..

Though, if you're focusing on a wealthy clientele, you could well have professionals listed offering experiences that they only do rarely, and aren't available otherwise.

Alternatively, you might be able to aim for mini or offbeat adventures as well, likewise only rarely available. "Get a tour of Chicago's graffiti from a famous (reformed) graffiti artist". "Tour of a (private) organic farm and lunch with the owners; offered 4x a year." "Letter-press tour and workshop in an active shop" -- etc.. I have a friend in central France, a professional baker with a massive wood-fired bread oven who tried giving daylong workshops on making organic bread a few times a year; it was pretty tricky to organize something so irregular, though, as she couldn't do it unless it was fully booked (if there were only a couple of people whose schedules lined up with a date, she would need to cancel it). There's a pain point that'd be nice to fix.

HTH.

What you can do.. although not as sexy is to limit this to 1 specific location, say Hawaii. I know there are a couple of companies that are making nice money by referring customers to certain adventures in a specific location (you never hear them in Techcrunch or HN, mind you because they not "sexy")

"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success."

Excursionist (http://excursionist.com) - Create and book unique, one-of-a-kind travel experiences. Definitely targeted at a higher end consumer. Worth watching for the way they editorialize places.

SideTour (http://sidetour.com) - Hosts create unique experiences. Users then buy those experiences. Looks like hosts write the copy for each experience, which (if that is in fact the truth) saves a lot of time on copywriting. Once you have the infrastructure you could theoretically scale across the world.

Overall I like the idea, but as a consumer I have a few thoughts.

1. I think it's going to be really important to separate yourself from the existing competition. Otherwise I probably won't sign up for yet another newsletter when I really only take a one or two trips a year. 2. The vetting/quality control process will be extremely important. If I'm going to climb Everest with someone, I really want to make sure the experience in their profile is in fact true. 3. Finesse re: selling me at the right time will go a long way. I don't know if this means you hit me when I'm actually booking a trip or what, but unless the way you present this experiences is incredibly entertaining/awe inspiring, this context factor could very easily make the difference between pestering the consumer and offering a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I don't think UrbanDaddy Jetset or Gilt's Jetsetter has this quite figured out. Though I'm sure they still make money, figuring out a way to present yourself more effectively could go a long way.

Whatever the case, I still think there's room for innovation in the space.

Keep the thoughts coming.

Re-ask this question after you have an MVP and post the URL. At the least it will be good implementation experience.

This means that, in this particular example, you need someone who has experience at least with tourism in general, and ideally with adventure tourism and similar activities in specific. Also, they need to be able to think out of the box and explore new possibilities in their trade.

Ideally, this means that you're working in an area YOU know intimately yourself, or barring that to have an expert for a co-founder. If you don't, you'll have to learn the basics and make the rookie mistakes which an expert would avoid.

When you look around, you'll notice that there are very few success stories that were started without an expert in the field. Off the top of my head I can think only of AirBnB, and they keep running into basic level situations like trashed apartment and the like.

http://www.zozi.com/gurus

There are plenty of expensive trek companies but what about lower cost adventures?

I think if the platform included teachers/coaches with skills to share, that would be awesome.

Like smaller adventures could be an afternoon learning parkour, gymnastics, breakdancing or an evening learning from a chef, expert fisherman or astrologist.

While I think it would be difficult to sustain a platform by offering once in a lifetime things (like Mt Everest) the list of above things could be once a month.

I'd be more interested in meeting up with reasonably local people that have awesome skills to teach me.

AirBnB has it's awesome castles and treehouses but I think it's bread & butter are lower cost sustainable transactions by volume.