Do you like scavenger hunts how I do? People who know me well may remember that three of my Tel Aviv scavenger hunts were sold via Stray Boots mobile application.
Stray Boots is an American start-up offering group and individual mobile scavenger hunt tours. This market is full of small players, but very few of them manage to scale their business significantly, so this case is definitely worth to look at.
They started with a mobile application for individual and small-group scavenger hunt tours which offered a 2-3-hour city walk full of puzzles, riddles and fun facts. Then the company decided to go global and developed an editing tool, that allowed people to create their own tours – either for private use or for sale in the mobile application (after the tour is edited and approved by the Stray Boots team). That's when I learned about them and we started to work together.
After couple of years, however, they decided to close the global program – apparently it was taking too much time and effort, but did not bring the expected profit. Now the company is concentrating mainly on corporate team-buildings and group tours in the U.S.
The lesson that I learned from Stray Boots is "don't be afraid to change your business model if you see that your original one does not pay off". This sounds obvious, but it takes a lot of courage and vision to scrap some of your previous work and go to a different direction. Good luck, guys!
Do you know other impressive stories of such "strategic U-turns"?Please share in comments.
