I strongly believe pitch competitions are negatively correlated with success because they bias for ideas that are easy to validate which means there’s probably a non-obvious reason it hasn’t been done already.
In this case, OP is working on something in the travel space which is notoriously a startup tarpit because customer acquisition costs end up killing most ideas.
You can’t meaningfully affect frequency of usage via your actions and the vast majority of the audience travels infrequently enough that they forget your tool exists the next time they travel.
Also, if you’re serving outbound, you need to bizdev a meaningful amount of the globe to first gain utility. If you’re serving inbound, the customer acquisition generally only happens late in the user journey and is expensive/time consuming to access.
There are still successes in the travel space but the odds are stacked against you.
This is a bog standard travel package. So many of these exist and they are not difficult to produce.
Selling them (really) successfully usually revolves around some pre-existing brand tied to celebrities, authors, books that connect with the destination or theme.
Yeah of course we did not reinvent the wheel, but from our personal experiences, user interviews and searches this is not present at the moment in the Italian market.
> "Gym access, comfortable accommodations, sightseeing, custom meal plans"
These are general descriptions as we are in the steps of finishing the program of the first trip offered.
I'll update the article once we defined the program better.
We have a marketing expert to take care about the promotion and positioning, that is not my area of expertise. I'll forward the advice to him.
thank you, if you have any other advice please feel free to comment. Any piece of feedback can be very useful in this step.
Thank you for the information. If you have any other advice please tell me I'm very grateful for any advice
We're aware that the small validation we were able to do during the weekeend so now we are trying to validate it really by organising a real trip in September.
We are trying to bootstrap it at the moment and count on our network of friends, Clients (the main founder is a personal trainer) and people that expressed interest initially. we count on organizing the first 2-3 trips to be understand if the idea makes sense to continue or not. we also aim to understand the difficulties with this 2 initial trips to perfect the formula for the trip and find difficulties.
We are not building a tool, but are trying to organize group trips to sell to clients.
We are aware of the high cost of user acquisition too so we have a marketing person in the team. And we aim to try building a community long term with old trip participants and interested people.
We also want to give a healthy/fitness spin to the trip so people will be able to attend the gym or do athletic activities (not my knowledge domain, I bring the outside view to the team by not being in the fitness niche).
If you want my personal opinion, it is too a niche for being a successful "startup" business.
Like imagine if I add to your pitch "trips for people that like ... And to have a bottle of ketchup on lunch tables and that like hotels name starting with b or k".
Probably ok for a small modest local travel agency but not more.
I would see more success as a "sport and leisure group trips travel" agency but I guess that there are few other competitors in the field.
Probably I explained myself badly due to English not being my first language.
>sport and leisure group trips travel
This is basically what we want to build. Organize trips that let you do sport, visit new places and if needed continue your specific implementation (for example finding your supplements and incredients in the apartment already). all of this while being with 8 or 7 strangers and 1 or 2 coordinators for the group
> are trying to organize group trips to sell to clients.
You might as well be saying "we are trying to make movies to sell tickets".
Organising group tours as such is easy, but the value is in the creative input that engages and inspires possible clients. Destination, people - both guides and participants, activities, materials are all part of this. It can't be "tested" just as two movies with the same synopsis can be completely different.
> Organising group tours as such is easy, but the value is in the creative input that engages and inspires possible clients. Destination, people - both guides and participants, activities, materials are all part of this. It can't be "tested" just as two movies with the same synopsis can be completely different.
Thank you for this input. I agree with you that the experience is the most important part.
We are preparing the first trip and will try to keep this in mind too.
We want people to go back home at the end with great memories and having met new friends.
We know we can't guarantee this to all but we'll try to insert activities and occasions to create community (probably not the best term to describe it).
The biggest success for us will be if people go back home with 7/8 new friends.
The best case scenario is you succeed after 10 years. The second best case scenario is you fail after a month. The worst case scenario is you fail after 10 years for a thing you could have figured out in the first month.
There's a very basic funnel you can define and the validation is inserting numbers into the funnel to figure out where (if anywhere), the business is. The artistry is figuring out where the rules are and where you can break the rules in surprising ways to make the funnel work.
eg: You can do customer validation on your users and ask them the following Qs:
* Have you ever gone on a group tour with strangers before, how many times? Under what circumstances?
* Show me your calendar for the last 3 months, black out all the dates you definitely couldn't have been open to a tour, what are the dates that remain as a percentage?
* How much have you spent on travel over the last 12 months? What percentage of that was the destination non-negotiable (ie: visiting parents) vs negotiable on a shortlist vs totally open to suggestion?
* How many tools that you used only once 3/6/12 months ago can you name right now? How many under the right prompting? How many did you totally forget unless you got the "oh yeah, I did use that thing a while back".
Start with the end result of how many people before a trip breaks even and work backwards to understand how many people need to fill a cohort before you can reach that breakeven number. Many people who are in your theoretical target market just can't do any trip for totally understandable reasons and you have to be realistic about the cohort you need to reach per trip at scale.
The art is figuring out which sub groups the numbers get weird in your benefit. eg: Parents with young children will always cluster their travel around the school calendar so you get a particular density you can build on but this is also not a group classically associated with fitness. Retirees have a more flexible schedule but also not associated with fitness. Are there other cohorts this might be viable with? I have no idea, it's your job to find out!
But rather than taking 3/6/12/120 months to figure out the answer, there's Qs you can ask that disvalidate your hypothesis in the first month! Figure out what those Qs are and ask those!
PS: I work as a founder coach, feel free to msg me from my bio if you're interested in talking more. Always happy to chat for free for motivated founders.
Success isn’t really the point. These competitions are a fun way to meet other people with entrepreneurial interest. You can work together in a team to build something quick together and if you like them you can keep in touch and maybe do something more serious later on. Most ideas at these weekends will be undercooked, and will need a few non-obvious pivots to be viable businesses.
I love your enthusiasm so let me share some hard-won learnings with you.
In my view, entrepreneurs spend way too little time on the problem space and rather jump into the solution space very quickly (way too quickly).
The world is full of problems people accept to live with that they just don't consider important enough to solve.
That's the essence of Paul Graham's 'build what people want, not what people need' which is the founder of YC.
People will tell you whatever they think you want to hear. When interviewing them you need to understand how they solved the problem before and the actions they took to solve it. Actions speak much louder than words and you can understand how they think about solving the problem which picks up valuable contextual information as well as potential alternative solutions (competing solutions) they evaluated.
Once you understand the full context and why they do what they do, you can identify the core problem and related "jobs-to-be-done" which really helps in setting product and marketing strategy as well as positioning towards others.
You can do all this with spending very little money to be honest, you may have to put money as an incentive to get enough people to talk to.
And then last, if I were you I would find AI use-cases in mid-size companies (20-200 employees). About 80% of early-stage investor money is flowing into AI right now.
Thank you — that’s genuinely useful advice. You clearly have experience in this space, and I really appreciate the thoughtful insights. I’ll definitely share them with my team.
> People will tell you whatever they think you want to hear. When interviewing them you need to understand how they solved the problem before and the actions they took to solve it. Actions speak much louder than words and you can understand how they think about solving the problem which picks up valuable contextual information as well as potential alternative solutions (competing solutions) they evaluated.
We tried to apply some of that in the limited time we had — for instance, we avoided presenting the idea directly and focused on questions that revealed whether people had faced similar problems before.
> And then last, if I were you I would find AI use-cases in mid-size companies (20-200 employees). About 80% of early-stage investor money is flowing into AI right now.
We're not actively seeking investment at the moment, but your point about AI in mid-size companies is very relevant — it's something we’ll keep in mind as we evolve.
A few weeks ago, I participated in a startup competition in Italy. Over a single weekend, my team had to develop a startup idea, validate it, and pitch it against other teams. In this article, I’ll share our experience and the key lessons that led us to victory
Hi, not that I'm aware of it. It was only the second time they holded this event in a smaller town in Italy (Mantova) so it's a bit less organized on that side.
I went to a startup weekend maybe 9-10 years ago. It was a lot of fun. I didn't pick the best idea to work on, just the funnest sounding. Ended up with a small team (3 of us total) and we we're one of the only ones to actually have a good demo. I try to do some kind of hackfest every year now.
There is just something magical about working on something fun and pulling an all nighter.
Yeah, it was my first weekend and I went there just with the objective of having fun and do something different but ended up going to this idea because the one presenting it had a huge charisma when presenting it and captured my interest.
Apart from this team i met some interesting people and I hope to keep in contact with some of them too.
The area where I live doesn't have an active tech community but it's starting to improve thanks to some communities meetups and similar events and the main attraction of this events is the ability to meet friends in tech or interesting fields like marketing.
I didn't have the energy to pull a all nighter so I went back home at 1 am, but some members did exactly that to finish the pitch for sunday.
Thanks for the great response! If you're curious how I handled this spike of traffic on a self-hosted Ghost blog, I'm writing a follow-up on my website, you can subscribe to read it tomorrow: danielpetrica.com
Cloudflare reported spikes of 13k requests per hour and cached 90%+ of the requests saving my site.
And the America continents were mostly asleep when it started, this things saved my site mostly.
We aim to offer trips to people caring about their lifestyle, think going to the gym, or being careful about what they eat. we want them to be able to meet like minded people and fun around people with similar interests.
Our fist founder is a personal trainer so we have his experience on that regard and we aim at this gym niche to differentiate from other group trips organizers in Italy or Europe.
Ahh.
I don't know if you're talking about revenue or clients count. I'll presume you mean revenue.
I personally don't think that kind of scale can be reached in the the first 4 or 5 years, of the company.
We want to go the bootstrap way at least in the beginning until we manage to create a process and find the issues that may arrive.
But after that, if we are able to execute and keep growing, I think it can be achievable as that niche is very big in Italy and later Europe.
we definitely want to expand out of italy after we managed to iron out the process in the Italian market first.
Me too! I went there for the same reason and met some interesting people. I also had great conversations with others.
Personally, I’m very introverted, especially around people I don’t know. But talking to those in the same field or about shared interests feels different. Even though I’m shy and introverted, I was still able to have long conversations about these topics.
Sorry for the delay, I didn't see your comment.
the idea behind this logic is that, if you solve a real problem and do it well marketing will be a lot easier and you won't have to spend millions on marketing if you don't want it.
It's always about the execution never about the idea. That is why Silicon Valley has such a track of success. Almost infinite amount of money to exhaust all possible execution paths. Even the worst ideas, will find eventually a success path.
Totally agree — execution is everything. We're trying to build on the momentum from the event and shape the product fast.
Would love your thoughts: is there anything you think we should do better or differently?
Looking at it from execution perspective, you might be able to get a faster signal if you manage to narrow the offer to a more specialized product.
It might seem counter-intuitive as it would narrow the market, but at the same time will provide more value for the potential audience. It will help focus marketing budget also. Like maybe target professional athletes or Pilates fans as an example.
Thank you for your suggestions.
I'll share this info with my team members.
I also think is better to limit the scope for, at least, the first travels until we establish a process.
I strongly believe pitch competitions are negatively correlated with success because they bias for ideas that are easy to validate which means there’s probably a non-obvious reason it hasn’t been done already.
In this case, OP is working on something in the travel space which is notoriously a startup tarpit because customer acquisition costs end up killing most ideas.
You can’t meaningfully affect frequency of usage via your actions and the vast majority of the audience travels infrequently enough that they forget your tool exists the next time they travel.
Also, if you’re serving outbound, you need to bizdev a meaningful amount of the globe to first gain utility. If you’re serving inbound, the customer acquisition generally only happens late in the user journey and is expensive/time consuming to access.
There are still successes in the travel space but the odds are stacked against you.
"Gym access, comfortable accommodations, sightseeing, custom meal plans"
This is a bog standard travel package. So many of these exist and they are not difficult to produce.
Selling them (really) successfully usually revolves around some pre-existing brand tied to celebrities, authors, books that connect with the destination or theme.
Yeah of course we did not reinvent the wheel, but from our personal experiences, user interviews and searches this is not present at the moment in the Italian market. > "Gym access, comfortable accommodations, sightseeing, custom meal plans" These are general descriptions as we are in the steps of finishing the program of the first trip offered.
I'll update the article once we defined the program better. We have a marketing expert to take care about the promotion and positioning, that is not my area of expertise. I'll forward the advice to him. thank you, if you have any other advice please feel free to comment. Any piece of feedback can be very useful in this step.
Thank you for the information. If you have any other advice please tell me I'm very grateful for any advice
We're aware that the small validation we were able to do during the weekeend so now we are trying to validate it really by organising a real trip in September.
We are trying to bootstrap it at the moment and count on our network of friends, Clients (the main founder is a personal trainer) and people that expressed interest initially. we count on organizing the first 2-3 trips to be understand if the idea makes sense to continue or not. we also aim to understand the difficulties with this 2 initial trips to perfect the formula for the trip and find difficulties.
We are not building a tool, but are trying to organize group trips to sell to clients.
We are aware of the high cost of user acquisition too so we have a marketing person in the team. And we aim to try building a community long term with old trip participants and interested people.
We also want to give a healthy/fitness spin to the trip so people will be able to attend the gym or do athletic activities (not my knowledge domain, I bring the outside view to the team by not being in the fitness niche).
If you want my personal opinion, it is too a niche for being a successful "startup" business.
Like imagine if I add to your pitch "trips for people that like ... And to have a bottle of ketchup on lunch tables and that like hotels name starting with b or k".
Probably ok for a small modest local travel agency but not more.
I would see more success as a "sport and leisure group trips travel" agency but I guess that there are few other competitors in the field.
Probably I explained myself badly due to English not being my first language. >sport and leisure group trips travel This is basically what we want to build. Organize trips that let you do sport, visit new places and if needed continue your specific implementation (for example finding your supplements and incredients in the apartment already). all of this while being with 8 or 7 strangers and 1 or 2 coordinators for the group
> are trying to organize group trips to sell to clients.
You might as well be saying "we are trying to make movies to sell tickets".
Organising group tours as such is easy, but the value is in the creative input that engages and inspires possible clients. Destination, people - both guides and participants, activities, materials are all part of this. It can't be "tested" just as two movies with the same synopsis can be completely different.
You can totally see my english is not the best.
> Organising group tours as such is easy, but the value is in the creative input that engages and inspires possible clients. Destination, people - both guides and participants, activities, materials are all part of this. It can't be "tested" just as two movies with the same synopsis can be completely different.
Thank you for this input. I agree with you that the experience is the most important part. We are preparing the first trip and will try to keep this in mind too. We want people to go back home at the end with great memories and having met new friends. We know we can't guarantee this to all but we'll try to insert activities and occasions to create community (probably not the best term to describe it). The biggest success for us will be if people go back home with 7/8 new friends.
The best case scenario is you succeed after 10 years. The second best case scenario is you fail after a month. The worst case scenario is you fail after 10 years for a thing you could have figured out in the first month.
There's a very basic funnel you can define and the validation is inserting numbers into the funnel to figure out where (if anywhere), the business is. The artistry is figuring out where the rules are and where you can break the rules in surprising ways to make the funnel work.
eg: You can do customer validation on your users and ask them the following Qs:
* Have you ever gone on a group tour with strangers before, how many times? Under what circumstances?
* Show me your calendar for the last 3 months, black out all the dates you definitely couldn't have been open to a tour, what are the dates that remain as a percentage?
* How much have you spent on travel over the last 12 months? What percentage of that was the destination non-negotiable (ie: visiting parents) vs negotiable on a shortlist vs totally open to suggestion?
* How many tools that you used only once 3/6/12 months ago can you name right now? How many under the right prompting? How many did you totally forget unless you got the "oh yeah, I did use that thing a while back".
Start with the end result of how many people before a trip breaks even and work backwards to understand how many people need to fill a cohort before you can reach that breakeven number. Many people who are in your theoretical target market just can't do any trip for totally understandable reasons and you have to be realistic about the cohort you need to reach per trip at scale.
The art is figuring out which sub groups the numbers get weird in your benefit. eg: Parents with young children will always cluster their travel around the school calendar so you get a particular density you can build on but this is also not a group classically associated with fitness. Retirees have a more flexible schedule but also not associated with fitness. Are there other cohorts this might be viable with? I have no idea, it's your job to find out!
But rather than taking 3/6/12/120 months to figure out the answer, there's Qs you can ask that disvalidate your hypothesis in the first month! Figure out what those Qs are and ask those!
PS: I work as a founder coach, feel free to msg me from my bio if you're interested in talking more. Always happy to chat for free for motivated founders.
Success isn’t really the point. These competitions are a fun way to meet other people with entrepreneurial interest. You can work together in a team to build something quick together and if you like them you can keep in touch and maybe do something more serious later on. Most ideas at these weekends will be undercooked, and will need a few non-obvious pivots to be viable businesses.
an economist sees a 20 dollar note on the floor. Doesn't pick it up. If it was there, someone would have picked it up already.
scientist has heard this so many times in the past he decides to test its validity. He drops 20 dollars in front of economist. Economist takes the 20.
Scientist: Damn it, now I'm out 20 dollars!
I love your enthusiasm so let me share some hard-won learnings with you.
In my view, entrepreneurs spend way too little time on the problem space and rather jump into the solution space very quickly (way too quickly).
The world is full of problems people accept to live with that they just don't consider important enough to solve.
That's the essence of Paul Graham's 'build what people want, not what people need' which is the founder of YC.
People will tell you whatever they think you want to hear. When interviewing them you need to understand how they solved the problem before and the actions they took to solve it. Actions speak much louder than words and you can understand how they think about solving the problem which picks up valuable contextual information as well as potential alternative solutions (competing solutions) they evaluated.
Once you understand the full context and why they do what they do, you can identify the core problem and related "jobs-to-be-done" which really helps in setting product and marketing strategy as well as positioning towards others.
You can do all this with spending very little money to be honest, you may have to put money as an incentive to get enough people to talk to.
And then last, if I were you I would find AI use-cases in mid-size companies (20-200 employees). About 80% of early-stage investor money is flowing into AI right now.
Thank you — that’s genuinely useful advice. You clearly have experience in this space, and I really appreciate the thoughtful insights. I’ll definitely share them with my team.
> People will tell you whatever they think you want to hear. When interviewing them you need to understand how they solved the problem before and the actions they took to solve it. Actions speak much louder than words and you can understand how they think about solving the problem which picks up valuable contextual information as well as potential alternative solutions (competing solutions) they evaluated.
We tried to apply some of that in the limited time we had — for instance, we avoided presenting the idea directly and focused on questions that revealed whether people had faced similar problems before.
> And then last, if I were you I would find AI use-cases in mid-size companies (20-200 employees). About 80% of early-stage investor money is flowing into AI right now. We're not actively seeking investment at the moment, but your point about AI in mid-size companies is very relevant — it's something we’ll keep in mind as we evolve.
A few weeks ago, I participated in a startup competition in Italy. Over a single weekend, my team had to develop a startup idea, validate it, and pitch it against other teams. In this article, I’ll share our experience and the key lessons that led us to victory
There‘s a typo in your photo caption: wining instead of winning
Thank you very much for pointing that out for me, I corrected it, cache permitting it should be live in the next 5 minutes
is there a link to the competition results page?
My friends sent me this link with a article from one of the organizers It's in italian so you may need a translation service. you can find the pitch for the top 3 ideas there: https://ltomantova.it/2025/03/31/successo-seconda-edizione-s...
Hi, not that I'm aware of it. It was only the second time they holded this event in a smaller town in Italy (Mantova) so it's a bit less organized on that side.
I went to a startup weekend maybe 9-10 years ago. It was a lot of fun. I didn't pick the best idea to work on, just the funnest sounding. Ended up with a small team (3 of us total) and we we're one of the only ones to actually have a good demo. I try to do some kind of hackfest every year now.
There is just something magical about working on something fun and pulling an all nighter.
Yeah, it was my first weekend and I went there just with the objective of having fun and do something different but ended up going to this idea because the one presenting it had a huge charisma when presenting it and captured my interest. Apart from this team i met some interesting people and I hope to keep in contact with some of them too.
The area where I live doesn't have an active tech community but it's starting to improve thanks to some communities meetups and similar events and the main attraction of this events is the ability to meet friends in tech or interesting fields like marketing.
I didn't have the energy to pull a all nighter so I went back home at 1 am, but some members did exactly that to finish the pitch for sunday.
Great attitude. You can’t know what is good at that time scale; may as well just pick something that resonates and have fun building!
Thank you! We do have fun at moment still, hope we can continue having fun
Thanks for the great response! If you're curious how I handled this spike of traffic on a self-hosted Ghost blog, I'm writing a follow-up on my website, you can subscribe to read it tomorrow: danielpetrica.com
Cloudflare reported spikes of 13k requests per hour and cached 90%+ of the requests saving my site. And the America continents were mostly asleep when it started, this things saved my site mostly.
That's is an interesting niche. I wonder if it is a lifestyle business or there is real potential for growth.
We aim to offer trips to people caring about their lifestyle, think going to the gym, or being careful about what they eat. we want them to be able to meet like minded people and fun around people with similar interests. Our fist founder is a personal trainer so we have his experience on that regard and we aim at this gym niche to differentiate from other group trips organizers in Italy or Europe.
Thanks. I was asking more is this going to be a small business or do you see a 10M+ business?
Ahh. I don't know if you're talking about revenue or clients count. I'll presume you mean revenue. I personally don't think that kind of scale can be reached in the the first 4 or 5 years, of the company. We want to go the bootstrap way at least in the beginning until we manage to create a process and find the issues that may arrive. But after that, if we are able to execute and keep growing, I think it can be achievable as that niche is very big in Italy and later Europe. we definitely want to expand out of italy after we managed to iron out the process in the Italian market first.
insane how much just showing up to these weekends opens up, i always end up meeting cool people and getting new ideas
Me too! I went there for the same reason and met some interesting people. I also had great conversations with others.
Personally, I’m very introverted, especially around people I don’t know. But talking to those in the same field or about shared interests feels different. Even though I’m shy and introverted, I was still able to have long conversations about these topics.
>>> The first lesson we learned was that every great startup idea must solve a real problem.
Yeah this is just wrong.
You’ll hear it all the time everywhere but it’s still wrong.
Your startup does not NEED to solve a problem.
Unless of course you want to play word games and twist everything in life in terms of it being a problem.
Sorry for the delay, I didn't see your comment. the idea behind this logic is that, if you solve a real problem and do it well marketing will be a lot easier and you won't have to spend millions on marketing if you don't want it.
> Your startup does not NEED to solve a problem.
A lot of startups offer the solution to problems that people don't actually have... And then (through marketing) make people feel the problem.
We hope that selling a solution to a problem people already have marketing will be easier
It's always about the execution never about the idea. That is why Silicon Valley has such a track of success. Almost infinite amount of money to exhaust all possible execution paths. Even the worst ideas, will find eventually a success path.
Totally agree — execution is everything. We're trying to build on the momentum from the event and shape the product fast. Would love your thoughts: is there anything you think we should do better or differently?
Looking at it from execution perspective, you might be able to get a faster signal if you manage to narrow the offer to a more specialized product.
It might seem counter-intuitive as it would narrow the market, but at the same time will provide more value for the potential audience. It will help focus marketing budget also. Like maybe target professional athletes or Pilates fans as an example.
Good luck!
Thank you for your suggestions. I'll share this info with my team members. I also think is better to limit the scope for, at least, the first travels until we establish a process.