In my previous blog post, I told the story of how I was introduced to the concept of semi-private jet travel and came up with the idea for Social Air. I told you about various key success factors, and in the process touched on the ultimate key, but to be honest, I don’t expect you to be clear on what The Secret Key is at this point.
In my previous blog post, I told the story of how I was introduced to the concept of semi-private jet travel and came up with the idea for Social Air. I told you about various key success factors, and in the process touched on the ultimate key, but to be honest, I don’t expect you to be clear on what The Secret Key is at this point.
You may be thinking that the key is the social aspect. After all, it’s right there in the name: Social Air. That social mindset certainly is essential to this business. After all, the way private jets are configured with seats that face each other, flying on them is an inherently social situation. Think of how awkward it would be with three different parties on a shared flight all trying to avoid making eye contact for two hours.
Rather than treating the fact that you are sharing the flight with others as an inconvenient compromise, it makes a lot more sense to embrace the social aspect and consider that a benefit. It’s a great networking opportunity — like LinkedIn on wings.
The other thing about this social attitude is that it promotes the attitude of flexibility that is necessary for this to work. Think about it — what are the odds that three or four unrelated parties all want to leave from the same airport and go to the same airport at exactly the same time? That’s right — exactly zero. No matter how many members we have, there is no avoiding the fact that travelers will need to compromise and coordinate their travel plans. Sociability begets flexibility, and this is key.
But it isn’t The Secret Key I’ve been referring to.
If you’re thinking that the ultimate key to this business is Volume, you are very astute. The higher the number of members in the network, the less flexibility is required. As I mentioned in the Intro to Semi-Private Jet Travel, I determined that a network of 100,000 members nationwide would be a minimum viable number. At that volume, you could expect there to be at least one trip a day between the most common routes, like Teterboro to South Palm Beach. Less common routes like El Paso to Aspen, for example, might require people to flex a few days in order to coalesce around flight parameters (i.e. Time/From/To).
A membership of one million members, on the other hand, would ensure that people could easily travel when and where they wanted on common routes, and on less common routes compromises will be in terms of hours rather than days.
So yes, a very large number of members is required for this business to work. But sorry, that’s actually not the ultimate Secret Key I’ve been referring to.
All of the above dynamics are critical for this concept to work, but without this final Secret Key, none of those factors are even possible. Are you ready? Here it is…
Membership growth must be rapid.
Why?
This business requires a baseline volume to run at operational efficiency. If there are too few members, they won’t be able to coalesce around shared flights. Either the members will be disappointed in the service, because they have to pay a lot more money than they thought, or they’ll have to be way more flexible than they expected, or the company is going to honor the promise to let them fly private for the cost of first class by subsidizing those flights, and they are going to hemorrhage money.
Any marketing strategy based on a standard demand generation program that incrementally builds the customer base over an extended time is doomed to fail. I call this period where there aren’t enough members to fill shared flights to capacity ‘the Valley of Unprofitable Flights’, and it is unavoidable.
You don’t have to be an aviation logistics expert to grasp this concept. Now that I’ve explained this dynamic, hopefully it’s pretty obvious to you, too.
So that’s the puzzle I’ve been pondering on for the last eight years.
And I have cracked the code.
I’ve developed a marketing plan that I call ‘The Exponential Launch Sequence’, and that is The Secret Key to this enterprise.
I’m not going to go into the details of that plan in this blog because that’s our proprietary ‘technology’. It would be the equivalent of divulging our patented algorithm publicly. In fact, one of the first things we’ll do once we get funding is to file a patent on the Exponential Launch Sequence.
So that is Top Secret Information. But I will gladly detail the plan to you if you decide to join the team.
And I guarantee it will blow your mind!
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