STARTUP STAGE: MintPass helps travelers document journeys, inspire others

Mintpass

Mintpass allows all travelers to become influencers - or at least "network tastemakers." 

Founded in 2023, Mintpass is a mobile app meant to help travelers verify aspects of their journey across flights, hotels, experiences and more to earn digital souvenirs. Together, the pieces collected are meant to create a holistic record of travel history that can be shared as recommendations with friends.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

MintPass is a mobile app for travel inspiration where anyone can be an influencer simply by sharing their adventures. We allow travelers to verify aspects of their journey across flights, hotels, experiences and more to collect digital souvenirs. Together, this creates a holistic record of travel history to be preserved as memories and shared as recommendations with friends. In turn, these collectors receive rewards when their experiences inspire others, as we provide booking functionality directly at the point of inspiration.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

We have identified a unique subset of travelers we like to call network tastemakers. These are grassroots influencers, often with the greatest depth of travel experiences. This, in turn, powers the highest quality of recommendations for others. However, current travel sharing mediums, where followers and filters are prioritized over experiences, underserve these types of travelers.

The goal of MintPass is to create a platform for travelers to document their adventures through seamless collecting in a way that doesn’t take away from the experience itself. In aggregate, this becomes a destination for following the travels of your direct network to gain insights on not only where they’ve been, but what they’ve done while there, all to guide your own travel decision-making.

Talking to users, we’ve seen records of this behavior in various iterations across note taking, calendar, document and photo applications. There is an intrinsic desire to chronicle travel experiences not only for personal commemoration, but for sharing with others to unlock those same experiences for friends and family. MintPass provides a more user-friendly, gamified ecosystem for this known behavior. Utilizing a proprietary traveler score metric to make the sharing experience more social, actionable and rewarding.

On the technical side, we allow collectors to scan a boarding pass to obtain a digital souvenir connected to a particular trip. We cross-reference this with publicly available flight data to verify. Each digital souvenir can then be dynamically updated and customized to reflect the entirety of the experience through verified check-in mechanisms and third-party integrations combined with sentiment analysis during the travel experience.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

Strengths:

Unique value prop – We are introducing new, novel mechanics including collectorship and gamification with a proven track record of success across other mediums to make the travel sharing experience more enriching.

Gen Z and millennial target audience – We see a perfect alignment in these generations given social travel behaviors combined with travel frequency and prioritization of spending on experiences over material goods.

Vertical agnostic – We have the luxury of competing with very few and having partnership application for many, complementing existing membership, loyalty and affiliate programs with a connected travel tech experience.

Weaknesses:

Pre-launch assumptions – Our concept relies heavily on anecdotal evidence in travel experience sharing that have yet to be proven through formal trials.

Team experience – Made up of experienced entrepreneurs and technologists with robust experience across other industries, our team lacks travel industry specific experience.

Unproven monetization strategy – We aim to introduce a hybrid monetization strategy to travel that may prove to be incongruent with existing infrastructure and consumer behaviors.

Opportunities:

Travel behaviors - Gen Z and millennials proving to be the most avid travelers among generations that we expect to accelerate as spending power increases with age.

Gamification layer – With an experience across multiple gaming verticals, our team is excited to introduce mechanics inspired by massively successful game properties into the world of travel.

Anti-social media movement – Amid an active pushback against traditional social media as a mental health drain, we position ourselves as a travel-based alternative for sharing experiences.

Threats:

Legacy travel competitors – If we prove to show early success, it is likely that large online travel agencies and other operators will integrate similar features into their existing offerings to drive loyalty and retention.

Macroeconomic environment – Uncertainties around the state of the economy in the United States along with global conflict and unrest leave the short- to mid-term future of leisure travel in flux. 

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

Now more than ever, we see travel decisions so often inspired by social media content. However, the process of capturing this content often takes away from the experience itself and can be rendered inauthentic by brand subsidies where your inspiration goes to the highest bidder as opposed to the best experience.

At the same time, travel recommendations from people we know are immensely valuable toward unlocking our own experiences. We believe a recommendation from a travel-savvy friend means 10 times more than an influencer paid promotion. We want to ease the pain point of curating and discovering these recommendations through gamified collectorship as a means for verifying and sharing experiences.

So you’ve got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

The core of our go-to-market strategy is focused on launch ambassadorships. This includes travel agents using social media as top-of-funnel and micro-influencers with rich travel history to utilize MintPass to better showcase their past travels and generate passive income when their digital souvenirs as proofs-of-experience inspire their clients or communities to book their own experiences.

With the above partnerships launched, as a platform built for socialized travel, we anticipate strong network effects built off gamification and growth hacking methodology, as MintPass becomes the preeminent hub for travel documentation for future recommendation sharing.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

Over the past several months of talking to our hundreds of potential customers, we’ve discovered a few key trends in how millennials and Gen Z travel:

• 97% across both demos will share travel experiences on social media.
• 90% of Gen Z and 84% of millennials are influenced to book travel off social media content.

This together has created a massive market in travel sharing and inspiration.

Separately, we see a sense of influencer and social media fatigue forming, as consumers favor input from friends over influencers to make buy decisions:

• 88% of consumers trust personal recommendations over influencer marketing.
• 51% of consumers admit to scrolling past influencer posts when browsing social media.
• 52% of travelers trust the recommendations of friends and family the most.

In aggregate, we know the market for travel inspiration powered by social sharing exists and that the buy decisions are being inspired by friends and family over influencers. MintPass intends to be a destination for this grassroots sharing of travel experiences.

How and when will you make money?

The platform will be monetized via a hybrid subscription and affiliate model where power travelers can subscribe to receive platform benefits in line with their tastemaker status while also receiving a share of affiliate commissions generated from their profile when others book after being inspired by their experiences. We believe this aligns well with how travel decisions are made in the digital era off the back of experiences of friends, where we reduce the distance between inspiration and booking while rewarding the originator of that value exchange.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Sam Simmons (co-founder and CEO)

• Former media executive as president of PokerGO
• Experience in content strategy, brand development and digital media
• Multiple industry awards including Cablefax Digital Rookie of the Year and Cynopsis Rising Star
• Angel and VC investor in various travel startups

Aaron Guyett (co-founder and chief technology officer)

• Ex-Amazon Web Service, Ex-Encore Capital
• 10+ years of experience leading developer teams
• Multi-time founder with recent exit in web3 loyalty
• Projects have received over $1M in lifetime grant funding

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

As a global travel brand, we seek to establish a culture that encapsulates a variety of demographic backgrounds from day one. While our core team is based in the United States, our remote work environment has enabled us to hire diverse talent from across the world, which has brought unique and valuable perspectives to the team at this earliest of stages.

What’s been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

It’s a challenge we embrace, but with so many viable partnership opportunities across travel, we are constantly put in a position of needing to prioritize and focus on a particular direction as to avoid being in a constant state of distraction. Presently, those priorities for us are our launch ambassadors as well as OTA affiliate partnerships.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

Our team brings a fresh perspective to travel rooted in backgrounds from outside industries. Our experience in the sector comes from our own travels, both in pleasures and pains, whereas our real expertise is rooted in technology, gamification and human psychology. We aim to harness these factors better than travel startups of old to create an offering that adds to travel through an engaging, rewarding and fun platform design.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

Our preference is to go deep before we go broad. A year from now our hope is to have a large, vibrant community of travel enthusiasts of all background who see MintPass as an extension of their real-life identity and whose usage is about sharing as much about who they are as where they’ve been.

In terms of business life cycle, while we’re currently amid pre-seed fundraising, our target is to raise a seed round in the middle part of 2024 with certain assumptions and business model proven. This time next year we’ll be wrapping up that process with the product in a much better place after rapid iterative feedback cycles through the early part of the year.

What is your end-game (going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)?

At the moment, our priority is fully on growth, but in the long term we believe MintPass provides a turnkey acquisition opportunity for one of the major OTAs to add a more engaging customer experience to their existing loyalty offerings more tailored to the travel tendencies of younger generations.

We want to become the leading source of travel inspiration by improving every aspect of the travel ribbon. Our end game with that in mind is to be the ultimate travel companion app throughout the connected experience, where travelers can earn rewards from recommendations between travels, explore hidden gems from their network leading up to and during travels and commemorate their experiences after travel concludes.