Turas.app - User Feedback, Monetization, and VCs

User Feedback

If you've been following along with Turas.app, you already know that it started as a tool hacked together over 3 days around New Years to solve my own needs for planning our 12 day spring break trip to Taiwan.

On day 7, I ended up sharing it to r/TravelHacks where the first batch of ~500 users started using Turas and sharing their feedback. It was this early feedback loop that kept me motivated to keep working on Turas on nights and weekends.

More recently, our top post on r/InternetIsBeautiful generated an even greater flood of feedback from users. This feedback is that driver for me to commit to Turas to get it to the next level: travelers love the tool.

But Gary Chao and I both agree that nothing beats users actually reaching out to us to report bugs ??. What this indicates is that users are engaged in Turas and using all of the features -- some times in ways that we didn't anticipate -- and running into these issues. Rather than giving up, they're powering through and then when they're stuck, reaching out to us because they want to continue to use it.

We were fortunate enough to have two users take us up on our offer to spend 30 minutes chatting with them about their experience using Turas! These interviews helped us learn a few things:

• Users aren't just coming to the tool from Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or Sheets; many have also tried more mature products like Wanderlog and found them too complicated and bloated compared to the tight focus and utility of Turas.
• Users are planning trips and adding collaborators to those trips. In fact, we see that 15% of our user growth is currently through this mechanism where users add their travel companions to their group trips. I think this number will grow because Turas is such a great tool for coordinating all sorts of group travel including company off-sites, customer on-sites, bachelor/bachelorette outings, and more!
• Users are not only planning booked trips, but also aspirational and upcoming trips. One user told us that she has trips planned 180 days and up to 1 year out and warned us that we better not shut down Turas before she travels her trips ??. (Rest assured, my own trips are also in Turas so that's not going to happen).
• Users are using various Turas features in unexpected ways. One user is using the Stories feature to communicate a shared travel plan with her mother because the Stories provide such a great visual structure compared to a Google Doc.

Aside from travelers, we've also been talking to a few travel creators and independent guides whom we are getting ready to onboard. We're preparing to roll out our first pilots of the Turas marketplace and testing of our payments integration. For the records, here is the first transaction on our live Stripe integration:

Step-by-step we're getting there!

Continuous Learning

One thing that I love about this process of figuring out how to make Turas a business is continuous learning and improvement. Gary and I are shipping updates, ideas, and fixes multiple times a week and figuring out what works and what doesn't.

I often think about this clip from Scott Brown:

The way you get better and overcome perfectionism is to do it → put it out there → get feedback → evaluate → repeat!

For example, our Facebook Ad game right now is terrible; it can feel like we're just burning what (limited) capital that we have, but the key is that without actually doing, it's hard to learn what works and what doesn't.

Product Updates

We shipped a LOT of updates this week. Some of it is thanks to input from Gary's friend Dan Li who provided a ton of really good feedback on the UX and UI. I think there's still a ways to go to make it even easier to use and more approachable.

Notably, we've normalized a lot of the input actions and buttons to be more consistent across the app thanks to Dan's feedback calling out specific areas where some inconsistencies could be confusing.

We've also improved the experience on mobile:

There are lots of other improvements as well like making some key actions more accessible in mobile views:

These are just some of the small improvements we've made while we continue to focus on the monetization features like the Marketplace and getting our Stripe integrations solid!

Because of the importance of Stories to the upcoming marketplace rollout, we've also focused a lot of effort on improving that experience. You'll have to log in and see for yourself :)

#Startuplife

We spoke with several more VCs this week. In fact, VC meetings along with the user interviews took up most of our Thursday.

The feedback we have had from a few of the VCs is that it is still a bit too early for them; 2023 definitely feels like a different VC environment compared to the last few years ??. Our chat with Brett deMarrais at Ludlow has been my favorite one; a totally different perspective and approach to every other call we've had. More importantly, Brett introduced Gary and I to this awesome treadmill.

Ethan Yu at Motion was also gracious enough to give us 30 minutes this week and give us his input on Facebook Ads ("Not yet") and whether we should be raising now or not ("Too early"). His take is always candid and pragmatic; I find it a good balance to Gary's enthusiastic optimism to keep us grounded and focused. In summary: prove the model, get revenue, show growth, then raise. A big part of that is that raising capital means locking in and foremost to that is Gary and I should be prepared for that commitment.

We'll continue to be opportunistic, but I think that our goals do not change whether we raise or not -- only the pace at which we can reach those goals: 1) grow the userbase, 2) roll out the marketplace and onboard travel creators and travel guides, and 3) continue to build features to help travelers discover, plan, travel, and share!

If you haven't yet, follow along with Gary and I as we continue to power forward!

Check out our updates from past weeks:

• Turas.app - AI, Marketplaces, and Rejection (5/27)
• Turas.app - Reddit, Maps, SEO, and More! (5/21)