hoo - A platform to assist hotel guests to get the best deal
As shown in the title, hoo is a platform that assists hotel guests to get the best deal. There is a selling point, which I personally find interesting. There will be more analysis below:
1. Pain points:
- OTA's full name is Online Travel Agency, which is an online travel agency. It spends $2 billion on Google ads every season, and then OTA operators will naturally pass the cost on to consumers and hotel operators.
- OTA operators take an average of 18 ~ 25% of the commission, and then if you go to the top search list, you will get a maximum of 40%.
2. Solution:
hoo launched a price negotiation mechanism (it is written Negotiate in English, but I actually went to its website to test the booking process, currently it seems to be more inclined to simple price bargaining), there will be a kind of game interest in price negotiation, I want to say whether the hotel will not I will agree with my unreasonable and inexplicable price (but I guess many consumers will offer random prices like me), and consumers can also click on the "My offer" field on the webpage to see multiple bargaining processes (The picture below is me pretending to be a consumer, comparing a one-night stay versus a two-night stay), very interesting.
3. Competitive barriers:
- Unique consumption experience, I personally think it can be a good barrier to competition, I hope hoo can continue to strengthen the so-called negotiation, such as room selection, add 3 USD to include breakfast, add 30 USD to send SPA, etc., more interesting Schemes can be matched.
4. Team:
-Co-Founder Adrian Murdock:
He is the Co-founder of Bubble, the UK's largest childcare platform (he claimed that bubble is the UK's biggest on-demand childcare app), but I entered "UK Childcare Platform" as a Google keyword, and another platform appeared, with the first three pages Neither has Bubble.
So I opened Cruchbase again to search for Bubble, and found that Bubble just completed its A round in July 2021. Before the profit and loss were evened out, there should be basically not much time to manage hoo, or in other words, unable to focus on hoo wholeheartedly.
- Co-Founder Duncan Mckenna, a serial entrepreneur, has also served as the CMO and GMO of two companies, showing a very high marketing ability.
- Co-Founder Sebastian Lewis, serial entrepreneur, in addition to hoo, there are two other companies running on hand, which makes people feel not very focused.
The three co-founders of this company, it seems that only Duncan is really full-time. If there is another Covid outbreak in the past few years of hoo development, who will support hoo to go down, it seems to be a big question mark.
If anyone wants to ask, why does Elon Musk have several of the world's largest startups at the same time?
Then I will ask you, Michael Jordan was an NBA team owner and professional player before his last retirement, would you play basketball one-on-one with him?
Behind the lack of focus in starting a business, most of the time, it is when the topic is selected, and the topic itself is not big enough, so if the A project reaches the ceiling, it is time to do a B project, and so on, maybe five, five The revenue is also very good, with tens of millions of Taiwan dollars, but if the founder is asked that which one will be listed so that investors can get off, it is very likely that he has no idea.
A friend of mine who is now back in Australia to start a business has a listed company at home. When we were studying Entrepreneurship program in Australia, he said: "Listing is a duty for entrepreneurs if you get investment." This sentence basically explains everything.
Another special case is Richard Branson of the Virgin Group. Richard creates a new business every three months, and once each new business has 50 people, he will hire a CEO of the business; but there are two key points behind this, one is Virgin is a private company. Investors can't control what Richard likes to do. The second is that Richard has a way to attract good small CEOs, which most people can't do.
The conclusion is that hoo as a whole seems to have some room for development. I read on Crunchbase that he has raised Pre-seed and Seed rounds, so this round is Pre-A or Angel round.
In this state, I think it is possible to invest, but in terms of the fundraising cycle of every 12 to 18 months, it must be observed after 2 to 3 years, whether you want to get off, in other words, don't be greedy, and don't chase after If it is high, it is possible to get out of the car at a profit. As for whether it can pass the B round, it is not a matter for the early investors (unless you like to lead the A round, but that is another story).
Overall, I would give 4 stars if all three founders were at hoo full time, but since two of them don't know where they will be in a year or two, I would give hoo 3.5 stars, which I personally think is a fair assessment .
Below is the fundraising link for hoo:
Do you think hoo should be a few stars, welcome to leave a message below, press like and share ↓↓↓↓
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