3 Things: Experiential Travel Rollup, Boop the Floof, The Next Meow Wolf
Happy Sunday (and Happy Halloween… my favorite holiday!!) and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotions so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
Experiential Travel Rollup
Boop the Floof
The Next Meow Wolf
1. Experiential Travel Rollup
For many decades, there have been travel options for niche travel based off of interests ranging from biking and active travel-focused companies like Backroads, culinary experiences from Gourmet on Tour, birding tours with Tropical Birding, and Jewish History trips from World Jewish Travel. There is an entire world of luxury travel companies focusing on the affluent who love to travel but want the 5-Star experience without having to do any planning or logistics themselves. These companies offer many destinations around the world and curate and plan trips of various lengths, providing everything from accomodations, transportation, unique tours and experiences, and food. The vacations tend to be very expensive but appeal to the avid and passionate traveler and tend to solicit brand loyalty where patrons continue to book their trips with the same company over and over.
International travel during the pandemic came to a screeching halt, but the latent demand has many convinced that the travel business will not only come back but be stronger than ever, especially for international travel. To date, the majority of these niche travel companies have been focused on an older demographic but over the past 2 years new startups are now focusing on the younger demographics, though almost all seem to be more around the idea of a personalized travel concierge than curated, organized tours. Millennials and GenZ are known for caring much more about experiences than possessions, and that relates to how they travel as well. There is an opportunity to create a Millennial/GenZ focused experiential travel brand that caters to various niches and focuses on the affluent young people who are willing to spend on their vacations. You could acquire small boutique businesses that already have packaged experiences in their category across different destinations. Unify under a hip brand and dominate the digital marketing and customer experience aspects leveraging social media and user generated content to help attract .
2. Boop the Floof
Our decreasing attention span, addiction to our devices, and need for continuous, mindless stimulation has led to many viral trends and large game companies. Very simple mobile games like Candy Crush (which does $1.2B in annual revenue) or Angry Birds (which does ~$280M annual revenue) have grown to epic proportions and garnered billions of users. Even sillier apps like Yo (which got over 100 million downloads), iBeer (which got over 90 million downloads), or BongoCat quickly went viral. Today, mobile gaming accounts for 43% of all smartphone usage and generates a whopping $77B (which is 74% of all app store revenue). The vast majority of this usage is casual gaming which are games that are simple, fast, and don’t require skill.
While most of my ideas in this newsletter are more serious business concepts, this one is somewhat silly and stupid but I think it could be an immediate viral success. The concept is an app called “Boop the Floof” where you are shown insanely cute dog, cat or other animal pictures (the “floof”) and you “boop” their nose. If you haven’t heard the term “boop the snoot” it has become an internet meme which means you want to gently and affectionately touch an animal’s nose. Maybe the animal image gets animated when you touch their nose or does some other cute behavior in the app. This might not be a long-lived sensation but I can see it spreading like wildfire, especially given how popular pets have become during the pandemic. Heck, there are over 4 million people who currently wake up every day and check TikTok to see Noodle the Pug and whether it’s a “bones or no bones day”. Knowing how much money people spend on pets, monetizing via ads would be a no-brainer and this could also be a $0.99 cheap but paid app. Users could even submit photos of their floofs to continue to generate new content and also create more engagement and virality. You could partner with pet influencer accounts and leverage their followers to seed the initial viral flywheel. If someone wants to help build this, hit me up 😀.
3. The Next Meow Wolf
In early 2008, a collective of artists in Santa Fe came together to start building interactive art installations and called themselves Meow Wolf. After years of doing pop up shows and displays in Santa Fe and beyond, the group of 135 artists created their first permanent exhibit called House of Eternal Return in 2016 with $2.7M from George R.R. Martin, $50k from the city of Santa Fe, and $100k from a crowdfunding campaign. This 20,000 sq ft interactive art playhouse is based on a fictional family who vanished after trying to bring back dead family members through interdimensional travel using a mysterious force known as "The Anomaly". The house fractured open paths to alternate dimensions and a secret government organization called the Charter was able to contain the Anomaly's effects and passes off the containment warehouse as an art installation. Suffice it to say, the experience is a trip. It’s like walking into a neon, sensory overloaded dream world with interactive secrets hidden around every turn. Since opening, the experience has become a massive success and Meow Wolf is now doing ~$73M revenue per year. They recently opened a 90,000 sq ft experience in Denver called Convergence Station and have plans for additional locations.
With massive successes like the Meow Wolf installations and experiences like the Museum of Ice Cream there is clearly consumer demand and a solid business model from these types of “businesses”. Given the fact that there are now over 50 million people who consider themselves “creators”, there are tons of opportunities to spin up interactive concepts like these with different groups of artists. Since many of these artists have massive social media followings, it would be easy to spread the word and get the initial demand from their followers. These exhibits lend themselves perfectly for photos and video, which makes it easy for guests to take selfies and staged photos to post on social media. While there is significant upfront costs in creating each exhibit, there is almost zero incremental cost as you need minimal labor and upkeep and can charge a hefty ticket price. There are also opportunities to create the digital equivalents and launch different experiences as NFTs to cater to the crypto/Web3 crowd.
That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine