The big bet
Well, we’ve decided to do what many great tech companies do: pivot. In this vein, we are also going to share our company story in future blog posts as we make the transition. By opening ourselves up to ‘build in public’ we hope you’ll join us in our journey, learn from us, and provide feedback when you have it.
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A note on pivots
Sometimes pivots can be small iterations of your product:
You remain focused on the customer and the problem
You adjust or extend the core product slowly and test the market
Other times, pivots can be huge changes in direction. Take Slack for example. The team chat app that has become commonplace in the newly emerging remote workforce didn’t start out as a messaging app. Early on the founders (one of whom previously started Flickr and sold it for $22M) set out to build a video game. They assembled an international team of developers and began to build. Their game was pretty cool. It took place in the mind of a giant as he navigated the world.
Stewart Butterfield, founder of Flickr, was obsessed with creating a neverending game. Instead he made Slack.
Working different hours across the globe, the team knew they needed something easier than email to quickly share thoughts. So, they used a standard messaging protocol to quickly send messages back and forth. It was nothing novel.
Millions of messages later, the team launched their video game. One….one hundred…one thousand users later, the team had an active install base for their game. Times were good! But, they didn’t last. Nobody actually played the game after install and slowly, their downloads flattened out.
Video games are hard to redesign. They were running out of money. And soon after launch, they had to make the decision to kill the giant. What they did have was a core product that they used every day: an internal tool that let them communicate with each other. And so, they decided to sell this tool into other groups of remote workers who needed to communicate effectively as teams.
Slack was born. Fun fact. Slack actually stands for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.” It was a feature that the team developed in the app to be able to search for previous messages - something no other chat app had at the time.
What type of pivot did we choose? (and why did we choose to pivot in the first place!)
We knew the problem was real: now, more than ever, we are able to travel more and for longer periods of time due to remote work but the travel industry didn’t have cost effective options to lean into our changing consumer behaviors.
We were also committed to solving it. After all, our mission is to create a platform that allows anyone to roam free. The name 48dots literally stands for a world where people can roam freely in Morse Code.
Home swapping was a great start. We built the product. We got active and engaged customers all over the world. They would propose swaps with each other. So, what went wrong? The issue we bumped up against was that dates and locations didn’t align frequently enough. Sure, we had some great home exchanges. However, too often, one host would propose swaps with several other hosts and, in the end, they were not able to make the exchange (even if it was a simultaneous one). Even with our active user-base, if home swaps weren’t happening at a rate that would allow more travelers to truly see the world whenever they wanted, we knew we weren’t solving the market problem we set out to solve.
Fortunately, we had a foundational product. And so, we chose a small pivot. But, the small pivot required a big bet.
We’re allowing you to transfer points to book short term rentals!
In order to decouple two hosts having to align dates and locations, we decided to allow guests to transfer loyalty points from any program to book short term rentals. To do this though, we had to make a big bet. It meant we had to convince short term rental hosts to accept points, integrate with a points partner platform to start us on our journey, get points transfer partners, re-educate the consumer on our offering….and the list goes on. How did we do? Well, we aren’t done yet. Stay tuned as we share more of our journey.