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Cool Cousin — Shaking up the travel world with good old human connection
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As a well travelled young man who has nothing cultural to add except for where to drink heavily in most Asian countries and plenty of European ones is there much point for someone like me joining? I can't say I'm one for tours, guides, architecture, and other touristy things when travelling.
@sobeyharker Hey, I love drinking and so I can be a perfect fit as your cousin 😉
As a traveler you're going to find cousins that are night owls, bar owners etc. who will give you awesome recommendations for any kind of local drinking spot you can imagine. On the other side, our community is curated of hardcore locals. We don't care if our cousins are into nightclubs or cafes, arts or sports, if they're vegan or carnivore, gay or straight - everyone is fit to be a cousin if they answer three criteria: They LOVE their city and updated about things happening in their scene, they are willing to meet our content creation standards and they're forthcoming people.
@itamar_weizman Cheers for the response! Well OK then I'll give it a fair shot then and get back to you with feedback at some point.
@nadav_saadia Congrats on the launch. The traveler side of this is compelling. But these sorts of models (and there have been a number of them) fundamentally come down to getting people / content into the system. What's the incentive for that side of the market?
I took a look at the ios app -- what's my core reason for being on the app? To meet people? What's the common thread among the people I see in the various cities?
I spent some time a couple years ago working to solve this same curated tips/recommendations problem, which I'm happy to discuss offline/twitter/etc - I don't want to derail the conversation here.
@drewmeyers Being a cousin gives you the opportunity to share your city, drive traffic to your favorite local businesses, and establishes you as an expert in all things cool. As Fanni, a Cousin in Budapest puts it, our Cousins want to “Make the city glow and share the magic!”
If you want to avoid generic spots and have a more unique, customized for your taste travel experience - you should probably use Cool Cousin. Oh, and you'll get it for minimum effort - no Googling for hours or bagging friends for recs.
Our Cousins are a global community of creators, explorers, partiers and hardcore locals hand-selected by the Cool Cousin team for their love of their cities and a passion for sharing it with others.
Journey is a paid service of a personal concierge. Although it might be great (didn't get the chance to use it honestly) it's a completely different service - Cool Cousin allows you to connect with like-minded people of your choosing and than with two finger tips to get "access" to their guidebook for the city. Once you do, you can also interact with your cousin and message them for further advice.
@itamar_weizman "Being a cousin gives you the opportunity to share your city, drive traffic to your favorite local businesses, and establishes you as an expert in all things cool."
"Our Cousins are a global community of creators, explorers, partiers and hardcore locals hand-selected by the Cool Cousin team for their love of their cities and a passion for sharing it with others. "
What is the problem you're solving for those locals? I get the traveler side, I don't get the locals side of the market. What's their incentive?
Some of my learnings: https://medium.com/@drewmeyers/d...
What a beautiful, thoughtfully-designed app. Give your designers an internet high-five for me. 🙌
Great concept, i believe real users bring the most value in every field.
Is android version on the pipeline?
Also you have already a huge competitor www.airbnb.com/new, after they acquired trip4real!
Good luck guys!
@rubenvivanti Hey Reuben, Thank you for the kind words! Android is mos def in the pipeline 🙂
Although we love hearing Cool Cousin and Airbnb in the same sentence, trip 4 real that they acquired is a tour service and Cool Cousin is a completely virtual service that allows you with two finger taps to connect with like-minded locals, get their guidebook for the city and message them if needed
@itamar_weizman Seriously considering a London trip now :D The app is good. I use an iPhone 5s and I find the app a bit slow. The scrolling gets stuck trying to load new content. And when I tap on a cousin, it takes 2-5 secs to load their info.
Love the design and creative, looks amazing. Some questions for the team:
1. How exactly do you curate the massive amounts of content on the platform?
2. If you had to describe the perfect user experience, what would it be? If you could tell the users how to gain the most value from the platform - how would you guide them?
Thanks, and great work! Would keep in mind for my next trip.
@guyklr Hey Guy, great questions:
1. We work closely with our cousins and our content team is there to guide them whenever needed during the process of curating their guidebook. Luckily our community of cousins is so passionate about their hometown that the work is very easy and all that we're left with is just improving our product that contains all these wonderful and unique recommendations.
2. IMHO the best use would be to connect with our cousins before arriving to the destination, this way you'll be super ready and pumped :-)
Start by picking a few locals you find compelling and make them your new cousins. After that you'll be able to review their recommendations, pick the spots that you like and add them to your wishlist of spots. And maybe the most important thing - you'd be able to message your cousins while planning your trip with questions like: "where should I get my airbnb?" so that you'd utilize their local knowledge to the fullest.
Have fun at your next trip!
Not sure how this is different from Kindred. I guess email login, but then how do you verify user legitimacy? UI/UX is non-native and a little rough. Any plans to build natively for iOS and Android?
@rueter Hi Steven. Honestly I wasn't familiar with Kindered but I just checked it out and seems like a great product that I will sure tryout. Cool Cousin is different because of a few reasons - we curate ALL of the apps content and working closely with our cousins on their guidebooks and allow users to mix between a very easy, passive experience of just getting curated guidebooks by like minded people and active experience of contacting the "authors" (aka cousins) of those guidebooks and getting personalized advice.
Regarding the second question - our app is completely native, but we do have some custom UI components that we use that are not the native platform one's. We are well aware of performance issues that we have, and are working towards getting things just right. You know how the saying goes - "if you launched a perfect product, you've launched too late".
@itamar_weizman it seems very labor intensive. How do you plan to scale? It seems a city-by-city strategy is futile, in my opinion. Is the app just for advice or is it actually to connect travelers and locals at destinations? Are you aiming to create a marketplace, like the Uber for travel guides, or is it more passive, like Yelp or whatever they call it in the UK? As far as product quality, perfect or not, never compromise at each iteration. If it's not your best work today, it never will be your best work tomorrow.
@rueter Hey Steven, there's always where to improve :-) especially when you're an early stage company like we are, but we are super happy with where our product's at right now. Touch wood, we are also getting great feedback from our users. Again, we are always thinking about how to improve but luckily we don't get many complaints about Cool Cousin being labor intensive.
Cool Cousin is not a marketplace per say but more of a community marketplace. Because we put so much emphasis on the quality of our content we'd rather go City by City first and learn as we go. Soon enough we're gonna start scaling so no worries, you'll have a (cool) cousin in the city you'll travel to.
And, as promised - I will check your app Kindred soon and to give you my honest feedback (if you'd like of course)
@itamar_weizman most definitely. My feedback is mostly technical, since you seem to have your focus dialed. Our approaches are a little different, but nonetheless, aiming toward establishing the coveted network of trust while traveling. I wish you guys all the best.
Waiting for the android release, make sure to post it here or somewhere i find it :) This looks like something i could and would use
@talkb1nary Hey Roman! we're working on it ;-) once we're live, we'll let you know :-) in the meantime you can check out our website www.coolcousin.com - where you can find a taste of each cousin's recommendations.
Not only for traveling! It's a great way to get to know the small cool places in your own city that only cooler locals than you know.
@rony_harpaz hey! We're launching our very first US destination next month, New York! We're really excited about it and it's only the beginning so stay tuned ;-)
LOVE the concept, design, and aesthetic! We (at Bold Tuesday) combine the concepts of travel with design, so we're obviously all about the idea of cosmopolitan exploration. Can't wait to try it out in the next few months when I travel to Germany and France! I'm from Minneapolis, MN (USA) now living and working in Europe, but Minneapolis is chock full of potential cool cousins—definitely an area to tap into when you further expand into the US. Cheers and well done!
@discopancakes thank you for the kind words Courtney! I love Minneapolis and it's a perfect fit for our product so we will definitely expand there soon enough 😎
Looks Awesome. I wonder how much it will differ from Airbnb Experiences. Really intrigued 🤔
@gus_navarro Heya Gus, Airbnb Experiences, like Cool Cousin, is aiming to help people experience things in a more unique less generic way but it's a completely different service. Cool Cousin allows you to connect with like-minded locals and "accesses" their knowledge with two finger taps - get their full map for the city and also message them directly for local's advice. We are not only offering great guidebooks curated by people like you, we also allow you to interact with the curators, aka cousins. With Cool Cousin you actually have a real, human, like-minded someone to reach out to in the city you're visiting. Hope you'll use us during your next trip ;-)
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