PackTwende is a combination of the English and Swahili words, "Pack" and "Twende" (which translates to "Let's Go").
The project (internally referred to as PT or PTW) aims to allow travelers to curate their own adventures and experiences by providing flexible, robust travel infrastructure and network layer to build on top of.
Why I started it
For years now, I've been fascinated with this concept I call BYOAd, Bring Your Own Adventure. Like playing with Legos, a traveler builds out their adventure block by block, creating an experience they'd relish every moment of.
Agentic AI has made this concept more viable than ever before.
The journey so far
My biggest challenge at the start was knowing close to nothing about travel and tour operations. So I did what I assume any founder would do: I organized a trip. After a few hours of research, I narrowed down to three potential debut destinations and, over the weekend, drove down to each one to recon and scout.
I negotiated for reasonable group pricing with each, asked a ton of questions about amenities, activities, food, accommodation, emergencies and so forth. Eventually, I compiled my findings and settled on Jangwani Camp Sagana.
Marketing
With the destination decided, I started work on a marketing campaign, mainly on Instagram and, by extension, Facebook. I curled the urge to go crazy on marketing as this was a research and learning experiment with one objective: gain first-hand insight into tour/travel ops. Here's a nutshell of what I did:
- Created marketing posts and copy for Instagram and Facebook. Experimented with different designs, target audiences, copy etc.
- Went back to Jangwani with a camera and a couple friends to capture the experience on video. Organized and edited the clips with no prior video editing experience. The final result was rather unremarkable, but it was something (you can check it out here).
- Sent hundreds of personalized DMs to ICP-fitting individuals. Mostly got no replies.
- Ran Instagram ads for 2 weeks with an average ad spend of $5/day.
- Called everyone on my contact list to sell tickets and recruited my friends and family to do the same.
In the end, we managed:
- 10 bookings out of a targeted 30
- 0 to 270+ followers on Instagram
Outcomes
- The trip was mostly a success. Had a couple of hiccups, but all in all, the customers had a good time and looked forward to the next adventure. They recharged and were ready for the work week ahead.
- On top of conversations I had with local tour operators willing to talk to me, I got a solid first-hand pass at grasping the logistics and operation of a trip, therefore achieving my initial objective.
Lessons
- Dive in before you're ready. Intuition, knowledge and taste come from mistakes. Bias towards action.
- Customer service is everything.
Opportunities/gaps discovered
- Trip planning for most local tour operators is ad-hoc: a mix of WhatsApp, Instagram, text messages, phone calls, a notes app on a mobile phone or some Google or Excel sheet that's forgotten as soon as the trip ends. It's fragmented and context mostly lives in the planner's mind. With time, important historical data is lost.