SHARK TANK APPLICATION: OUR BIGGEST HURDLES, PART I.

What are the biggest hurdles your business has had to face, and how did you and your business overcome them?

Sharing our Story: One of the biggest hurdles that our business faces is one that I feel many businesses face, especially for those businesses who have invented a new concept/product, which is marketing. Constantly, we are trying to think of and find new ways to share our product all the while having access to very little capital or resources. We never took out a massive loan or had a venture capitalist backing us which would have provided us a long financial runway to run a sustained and effective social media campaign. We didn’t have access to social media influencers or the capital to invest in having an influencer share our story.

So, as one of our business mantras goes, “Scarcity breeds Creativity”. We got creative. We introduced a feature in all of our travel kits and journals in which each of our customers would find one international coin. The deal is, if they travel to that country, take a picture of their travel kit or journal with it, and tag us on Instagram/Facebook, then we would buy them a round of drinks or a giant bowl of ice cream. The first successful time we did this, a young woman traveled to Russia for the World Cup, took a picture, she had forty of her friends “like” it, 5 of them commented asking questions about it, and one of them bought our travel kit. So, rather than paying a social media influencer thousands of dollars to share a picture of product, we much rather buy one of our Atlas Travelers (customers) a drink somewhere in the world and have them share our product with their respective 300, 500, or 1000+ following of their friends and family. Multiply that out by every person we sold one of our Atlas Kits/Journals towards- we are talking about a potential network and reach of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people.

And, now 8 months into sales, we have almost bought a round of drinks or ice cream on every continent, and our “first round on us” promise is one of our most talked about features, which only continues to drive word-of-mouth! As we said, “Scarcity breeds Creativity!”

Many Thanks and Cheers,

Matt