I strongly believe pitch competitions are negatively correlated with success because they bias for ideas that are easy to validate which means there’s probably a non-obvious reason it hasn’t been done already.
In this case, OP is working on something in the travel space which is notoriously a startup tarpit because customer acquisition costs end up killing most ideas.
You can’t meaningfully affect frequency of usage via your actions and the vast majority of the audience travels infrequently enough that they forget your tool exists the next time they travel.
Also, if you’re serving outbound, you need to bizdev a meaningful amount of the globe to first gain utility. If you’re serving inbound, the customer acquisition generally only happens late in the user journey and is expensive/time consuming to access.
There are still successes in the travel space but the odds are stacked against you.
In this case, OP is working on something in the travel space which is notoriously a startup tarpit because customer acquisition costs end up killing most ideas.
You can’t meaningfully affect frequency of usage via your actions and the vast majority of the audience travels infrequently enough that they forget your tool exists the next time they travel.
Also, if you’re serving outbound, you need to bizdev a meaningful amount of the globe to first gain utility. If you’re serving inbound, the customer acquisition generally only happens late in the user journey and is expensive/time consuming to access.
There are still successes in the travel space but the odds are stacked against you.