Just got back from a “lunch with the Skyara founders” event that I discovered and purchased through their website, Skyara.com. Well worth the $20.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, Skyara is a local-activities website where you can find exciting things to do around the city. For the moment, that includes activities as varied as marksmanship training with an army ranger, Barrista lessons, and a most-likely-to-be depressing date with this guy. Being a bit of an experience junkie myself, I love this idea. I’m always looking for fun things to do and cool places to check out in San Francisco. I find the Bay Area to have a high explorability factor as the neighborhoods are so different, the area culturally rich, and the geography diverse. So, I guess that SF isn’t just a great place to start a company; it’s also a great place to start a company that sells things to do.
The product is easy to use and impressive considering these guys have only really been riffing on it for a couple of months. You just go to the website, find something that looks interesting, pay for it, and show up on time. Pretty simple really. As the product gets built out further and there are more activities, I’d also love to see a recommendation engine. You can image with information pulled in from your social graph, Skyara could be incredibly effective at helping you part ways with your money. As for the team, they all quit their corporate jobs after getting into I/O ventures, and moved out here to start the company. True entrepreneurs, they’re cash efficient like you wouldn’t believe and are working out of the I/O office in the Summit Cafe on Valencia.
What most intrigues me about Skyara is that it could be a great platform to help niche business operators or people with creative hobbies or services to find customers - a localized Etsy for experiences instead of crafts. Right now the website has a lot of traditional outdoorsey offerings such as paintballing, cycling trips, and hiking expeditions. Although those activities are certainly valuable, they’re probably not going to make the site that interesting. More important are the unique, one-off activities - a 30 minute punch the clown session, lunch with the AirBnb engineers (to discus time travel), etc. Those will be the key to keeping users engaged and coming back to the site for more. I’m sure there will be some organic growth for these listings (as the service attracts more eyeballs, more people will think up things to list) but growing the volume substantially will require intervention. They may want to take a page out of Trazzler’s playbook by using contract writers and contests to produce content.
With a good product in place, I’m looking forward to the sure-to-be creative marketing these guys will do. They received great press last week in TechCrunch, but with so much noise in this startup environment, you could always use more. I’m thinking a contest to win a really unique experience combined with a splash of social/game mechanics could really drive registrations. I.e. the experience is won by lottery, but for every friend you refer who signs up to the site, you get an additional entry. You could spend a week brainstorming cheap guerrilla marketing activities, but I’d probably start by coming up with a catchy headline. How about: “Skyara: Do Something Awesome”.
Follow Skyara on Twitter here
1 year ago
