Happy Sunday 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:
Instagram-Worthy Map
Airline Boarding Optimization
AliExpress for X
1. Instagram-Worthy Map
In nearly every city (and many small towns) there are notorious Instagram spots where influencers or wannabe influencers flock to take photos that they’ll post to their social media accounts. You’ll often see people lining up for their chance to pose in front of a cool looking piece of graffiti art, funky sculpture or bench, major monument, or viewpoint with killer background scenery. You can find blogs that list the most Instagrammable spots in their respective cities (Chicago example here) but you’d have to do Google searches for each location, weed through all of the blogs, create your own itinerary, and map out each spot. Even before the pandemic, Millennials were specifically choosing travel destinations based off their ability to get great pictures for social media. Over the past 2 years, more young people than ever before have chosen to be nomadic since they can work from anywhere and now that travel has opened up again, the rest are taking their pent up stir craziness and pouring it into travel plans.
An app should create a map of the most Insta-worthy spots across the world. It could offer various tips about the locations such as suggested poses, best times of day to visit, optimal filters or lighting, and more. You could see who else has taken and posted photographs in that location across your friends, followers, or fellow influencers who you follow. The app could also auto-post to social for you and automatically apply the right tags and copy to get the highest exposure. It could also provide suggestions on things to do and places to visit nearby such as the best coffee shops, restaurants, boutiques, or tours. Owners of local establishments can pay to get promoted and when a user checks into the spot using the app, you could charge affiliate fees for sending traffic their way. There could also be a variety of paid features within the app such as the suggested poses or geo-fenced custom filters and stickers. Additionally, AR functionality could add layers of engagement and novelty.
2. Airline Boarding Optimization
Ever since airlines have started charging for checked bags, they’ve forced passengers who would have opted for checking their luggage to carry on instead. Planes were not built with enough overhead storage for the amount of baggage that passengers are now trying to carry aboard, so on nearly every flight that is even somewhat full, the people who board last end up having to check their bags. This causes not only a ton of frustration and customer wrath, but also results in extremely slow boarding, delayed takeoffs, and damaged bags. Not to mention, the airlines gate check these bags for free so they earn no additional revenue. Given the fact that most airlines NPS has absolutely gone down the toilet and they are struggling to make money and retain patrons, smart airlines should make some radical changes to improve the quality of service and improve efficiency.
For a long time, I’ve had an idea that I’ve wanted to pitch to a forward-thinking airline. In reality, most flights (even full ones) should be able to accommodate all bags in the overhead bins, but by letting the passengers load their own bags, people put backpacks, purses, hats, and other small items in the space reserved for luggage. In the boarding area, there would be small rectangles on the ground in rows with each seat number listed in the order they are situated on the plane. If you want to carry on a bag, 20 (or maybe 30) minutes prior to takeoff your bag must be placed on the space dedicated to your seat number. A small crew of people would then load the bags from back to front in a hyper-efficient assembly line manner which should take no more than 10 minutes. At that point, you invite the passengers to board which would be incredibly smooth and fast since all of the overhead bins will have already been closed and all people need to do is walk on and sit down. I think this would dramatically improve the on-time performance rate which is a huge deal for airlines in addition to boosting customer NPS (which is a major focus for airlines) and loyalty. It’s also something so novel for the industry that any airline who adopted this would get a ton of press and social amplification which would provide a bump for their brand and sales. A 3rd party company could offer the logistics and labor component for airlines as I think it’s unlikely that the airlines will do this themselves. That also enables the company to work across airlines and optimize crew scheduling in each terminal at airports. The business model would be to charge per flight and package contracts with airlines based off of the number of scheduled flights per airport per month where they want to utilize this service.
3. AliExpress for US/Mexico/etc
AliExpress, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group launched in 2010 originally as a B2B ecommerce marketplace aggregating Chinese small businesses and connecting them with buyers from around the world. They quickly expanded to also support B2C and even C2C (individuals selling to individuals) and run localized sites in a variety of languages which is now the bulk of their business (vs Alibaba which focuses solely on B2B wholesale). AliExpress has now become the highest traffic ecommerce site in Russia and 10th most popular website overall in Brazil. A significant portion of AliExpress merchants are drop shippers who leverage chinese manufacturers to fulfill the international orders. Many merchants offer free shipping even across the Pacific ocean since there is so much volume of goods coming from China, but the catch is that you have to wait many weeks or even months for your items as they are aggregated onto available shipping containers.
While China is the largest manufacturers in the world, there are many other countries, including the US which is the #2 manufacturer on the planet, who do a ton of production. As we have seen this year, the global supply chain has become extremely fragile and inflexible due to the world’s reliance on China, resulting in extreme delays, shortages, and ultimately business and consumer exasperation. As more and more ecommerce companies crop up across the world and as more consumers do the bulk of their shopping online, suppliers based closer to where they operate should be able to serve those customers. In addition, as more consumers look for bargain prices and brandless (or brand agnostic) products, there is an opportunity to connect these manufactures and suppliers to the local demand. In the US we’ve seen Faire have explosive growth and raise ~$700M in only 4 years, but they only support B2B sales for brick and mortar or online merchants. Other startups are now waking up to this opportunity and recently we’ve seen Tundra and Bzaar raise large rounds to focus on B2B wholesale as well, utilizing vendors in North America and India respectively. What’s lacking is the wholesale-to-consumer market that AliExpress has opened up for China. Focus on a specific manufacturing country, aggregate suppliers, and create a simple and beautiful marketplace for both businesses and consumers.
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
3/3 solid! In particular, hadn’t thought of optimizing carry on loading before.
Here’s my 1 Thing for you:
I feel like you could get more eyeballs on your quality content if you maybe tweet out your 3 headlines each week? Like a thread with 3 tweets. Seems like a good fit for your structure. I’m good for some engagements on there.
3 Great Things today! There is a real need for a North American (Including Canada) resource to search, link and showcase products manufactured close to home. The supply chain problems are reduced if we could buy more 'local-ish' products for drop shippers, and even retailers.