Making travel plans and figuring out an itinerary is no easy task. Traveling to exotic countries and budgeting your travel comes with its fair share of difficulties. If you’re not the best at planning, you might want look for people and tools that can help you. Gypsy is an App developed by Juvo Labs that has solutions to many of the travel problems we face. The application will bundle all necessary travel features that will help and guide travelers and tourists. In conversation with Div Rakesh, Co-founder of Gypsy, Venture Mirror learns more about it and how one can use it while traveling!
What is the startup/product about? Give us a brief description of it.
Juvo Labs wants to be a global leader in Social & Professional Networking.
At Juvo Labs we want to build Social & Professional Networking Apps focused on various niche. We see a change in networking towards community focused content and connections and Juvo Labs wants to be the pioneer in the domain.
To start with, we are focusing on Travel Domain as this is the most impacted domain amidst COVID and will be the most challenging to revive. We want to assist the revival of the industry by doing our bit.
The app is called “Gypsy” and is intended to make travel less stressful for the users while they connect and enjoy the local culture of the place. The mantra for the app is to Democratize Travel by enabling people to connect and be helpful / useful to each other. The application will bundle all necessary travel features viz. organize, socialize and summarize all your needs.
How many co-founders are there? Please introduce them and their backgrounds.
Div Rakesh 
Chirag
We are 2 co-founders and have a technical advisor on board.
Apart from me as CEO we have Chirag as the CTO whose career started as a Quality Analyst in a software company which later paved way to many more exciting avenues for him.
How big is the entire team currently?
We are 10 member team as of now
How did you come up with the idea? What motivated you to do this?
The question we asked ourselves is Why do people go on holiday? The answer which popped in our mind was to reduce stress, relaxing. As we further surveyed and learned we found people mostly travel to strengthen their relationship and as a time to make friends. Next question we asked What problems do we face on holiday? All travelers are not meticulous planners and they are indecisive while choosing tourist places to visit in a given time range. Other common problems are tracking the expenses and budgeting as well a sense of insecurity while interacting with locals and fellow travelers. Next question we asked Do we have existing solutions in place? We searched over the internet as we found many solutions addressing one or another problem.
How do we address them all? We realized this cannot be achieved without help of the community, hence we derived the concept of GYPSY which would complement Tourism which is “one of” the world’s largest economic sectors with technology.
What is your target market? Why do you think your product will appeal to?
We are looking to target people between 25 & 45 years of age. Various features appeal to different demographics e.g. Travel buddy might click with younger people and itinerary organizer will click with busines travelers. We have kept in mind various aspects and needs of our clients while defining the features.
What are the marketing plans apart from the product hunt/beta list launch? How are you planning to acquire new users?
We will be making a launch on Product Hunt on 27th September, however our major audience will be available on social channels like FB / Insta and we have started to engage with them.
We are listening to their needs and will incorporate them in our future releases.
Do you have a separate dedicated team to take care of marketing (digital marketing/traditional marketing)? Which digital platforms are you focusing more on?
No, most of the marketing is done by me. We are focusing on Facebook & Instagram
What according to you is the biggest challenge that you faced? Is it product development or marketing or scaling or … ?
Marketing and getting active users is the biggest challenge for the app. Its like you need to have the first tipping point of active users, after which the users come onboard on its own. Getting to that point is most challenging and critical part for us.
Who are your competitors/alternatives? What sets you apart from them?
Our competitors are multiple e.g. we compete with TripIT in itinerary organization, with Meetups in socializing, with Splitwise in sharing and settling expenses.
Where we differ is that we offer market place for many more travel based use cases like guides, food, culture, etc. Not only this, unlike our competition our App is AI driven and comes with a personal assistant. The list of features to be launched in next few months is comprehensive Deep Tech driven.
What are the future plans with the product/startup? Any new features you are planning on?
Well the roadmap is busy for next 6 months and a rollout on the cards every alternate month.
Know a great start-up story or want to share your own? Write to us at interact@insidermediacorp.com and we will get back to you. For more updates follow Venture Mirror on Facebook