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Comment by matrix | Hacker News Reader

Not mentioned in the article: the market which this person was trying to enter is saturated with competition. These tour operators are bombarded with pitches for these things every day, and of course every one of them wants a cut of their hard earned revenue. It's a bad deal for a small business owner. They take all the risk, invest all the capital, while some SV firm comes along and kindly offers to scoop all the cream (margin) off the top.

So, this business failed due to a combination of lack of knowledge of the market and were not addressing a truly burning need for customers.

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I also want to say that an industry doing things on paper and in person isn’t always in need of a high tech overhaul.

Why would a scuba shop want to take on the burdens and issues of your tech solution? They are running a shop already. I don’t imagine they planned on becoming billionaires. Maybe they just like scuba and want to facilitate other people enjoying it too.

Telling ann established business owner you have a “better way” to do something is so arrogant. Not everything has to be hyper technologically advanced.

I think this really is the most important point. They could've figured this out in a much lower-budget way by having conversations before investing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Pitching these business owners before making the app (or with a much lighter-weight version like a Shopify store) was clearly the right move, but you've got a founder who didn't want to sell (which is maybe as big of a hurdle as the saturated market).

And now that I think about it, I would bet they could've gotten 95+% of the functionality they needed with a Shopify store that cost a few hundred bucks per month and maybe some overseas VAs.

To add a marketplace is doubly hard, you have to acquire both demand and supply sides, running sales and marketing to 2 different groups. Targeting tourists/last minute is even harder because you need to be there at right place at right time. To make matters worse, there is a plethora of options for tourist, speak to locals or google or TripAdvisor

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