I hear your concerns. The key I found in certain airports is that one day immigration might have no wait, but another day you're stuck waiting for over an hour. For people who travel relatively frequently, especially business travelers going long distances, seeing that line is a nightmare.
To your point, $210 in HK isn't for everyone, but a number of people find the cost quite reasonable for the time savings and safety factor.
We're new and still crafting our pitch, so I definitely appreciate your feedback there as well!
Generally countries offer expedited customs and immigration for frequent travelers. For Hong Kong and most Asian countries, there's the APEC card which costs about $100 (one-time fee) and an interview at the airport in the US.
Pricing varies and our goal is to make it much consistent in the not so distant future. When we decided to build Solve, we thought we were building a simple booking engine. But really, behind the scenes, we are taking a ton of data and making it easy to understand. It just ended up being much more complicated than we thought.
Now that we've got a better understanding of price, it will help us figure out how to optimize. The paired pricing is actually just legacy in the space and we'd like to ditch it or at least come up with something better.
We've got some work to do before we're at the 50-100 buck range, but we definitely appreciate your perspective and feedback.
Thanks so much for your feedback! We are seeing a number of clients who simply want a little help getting through the airport, especially on tight connections.
The key for us is making it more accessible and easy to book. We know that the current space is about to evolve pretty quickly. The current companies and individuals have actually been quite receptive to our approach. They just haven't had access to the tools we're building and the customers we're reaching.
Otherwise, yeah, we want to bring it to more places as we get a better understanding of the demand in places where the service isn't currently offered.
You're right, the domain wasn't cheap, but we had it prior to YC. We bought Solve.com at my last company (n/k/a StudentBrands.com) for a math-related product we were going to build, but we decided to focus elsewhere and didn't use the domain. Anyway, we were able to work out a way to use it in a way that worked out for everyone.
I kind of expected something like that, based on the generic-ness of the domain. Hopefully you can leverage that generic-ness into solving other problems under the same name.
Thanks! You're spot on about the difference between us and Clear. It sounds like you had a tiring customs experience on your trip from Rome to the USA!
It wasn't easy to launch in 500 airports. Through a ton of research and work, we were able to partner with many companies and individuals who had the appropriate access at each airport. The key for us was that we wanted to create the one trusted, consistent place book this service.
Communication with everyone involved has been a pain point for us, even as we've thrown technology at the problem. Right now, we're of course communicating with our agents via email, phone, and text to make sure everything goes smoothly.
Plus, our clients have the agent's information and the agents have our client's information, so they can communicate directly if necessary. In the near future, the client and the agent will have a Lyft-like experience on arrival or departure, where our agent sees the customer information on their agent app, and the customer sees the agent information on their customer app. This will be a massive improvement to the industry.
> In the near future, the client and the agent will have a Lyft-like experience on arrival or departure, where our agent sees the customer information on their agent app, and the customer sees the agent information on their customer app.
That's not going to happen without a data connection on the customer's phone though, which means either expensive roaming, buying a SIM card before they meet the agent, or fighting through crappy airport Wi-Fi sign-up pages. You could potentially partner with the airport Wi-Fi and have your application authenticate them to the Wi-Fi network automatically though. Do you have any other thoughts on how to solve the data problem?
True - it won't work in every situation. We're planning to communicate similarly to how Airbnb communicates when a host gets a booking - push notification, text message, and email at all once. In the cases where someone doesn't have data, they often are still able to receive texts (not always).
Either way, we already over-communicate to the client to make sure they know what to do. Eventually, the agent's app will be helpful too, so the agent can recognize the client if the client uploads their photo to our system.
Your idea about Wi-Fi is certainly something to explore as well.
To your point, $210 in HK isn't for everyone, but a number of people find the cost quite reasonable for the time savings and safety factor.
We're new and still crafting our pitch, so I definitely appreciate your feedback there as well!