Live: Travel app  

Challenge – Help a start-up challenge the $16 billion tour industry

In 2016, Pull partnered with an early stage start-up hoping to redefine the “tour guide” experience. The Live team had seen first hand that the needs of many young travelers were left unmet when it came to booking and experiencing tours. Equipped with initial seed funding, Pull was engaged to guide the new venture from initial idea seed to a validated business and design concept.

Setting the stage

With stakeholders spread between New York, Oslo, Stockholm and Rio, we convened by leading an Opportunity Session. This session focused on identifying current hypotheses, knowledge gaps and recommending an optimal organizational and collaborative structure.

User centered from inception

As a newly founded start-up, we had the opportunity to instill best-practice user centered design principles at the core of the company’s foundation. As part of this mandate, we led key research activities prior to any design efforts. In order to build customer empathy across the newly founded team, in-depth interviews with target customers were conducted in the US, EU and Brazil. Additionally, team members participated in immersions on competing service platforms to identify key attractors and pain points. Insights from these activities directly served as the guiding principles for subsequent business, brand and product development.

Prototyping to Learn

We led the design of a series of MVPs. Beginning a broad series of design scenarios, we presented target customers with interactive digital prototypes to gauge initial reactions and preferences. After several rounds, we developed the initial UX flow and preliminary user interface.   

Building the business case

Having a clear understanding of the customer benefit and market desirability, we created a business justification that would serve as the venture’s foundation for series-A funding and initial launch.  

Developing the brand foundation

We equipped Live with the appropriate brand vision, an essential and core element of the value proposition. This included the articulation of key Brand Criteria, the visual and brand design foundation and conceptual activations.

Results

• Our role was pivotal to the venture’s initial closing of seed funding and subsequent investment.
• Live is currently final stages of development and preparing to launch their beta version in several key regions.