The weekly life of a travel startup - Get ready for the pitch

Last week I wrote about the importance of finding the perfect co-founder and the journey to getting the right idea.

We started defining Kukunu's concept in more detail, a new travel planning experience that would be fun and easy to use, and that would leverage smarter technology. We already had a good idea of the business model, and I built a first business case before sharing Kukunu's concept with some travel experts and investors to challenge us and improve the proposition.

"First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down", Ray Bradbury

Last August we decided to quit our day jobs and work full time on Kukunu. We never had the opportunity to start thinking about next steps as a few weeks later we were selected for the Seedcamp 2009 final.

I'm trying to keep this post short, so if you want to know why Seedcamp is such a great experience, go read the post by Emi from Brainient, http://bit.ly/74wClX. It was a fantastic week, we met awesome people, some of them are still helping us today.

We left Seedcamp with one idea in mind, get something, anything - a stripped down version of Kukunu - out in front of some users. One developer and eight weeks later, we had a first preview of Kukunu ready to share with some friends. We are now getting ready to launch a closed beta at LeWeb in Paris. Another fantastic opportunity, but I'll talk more about that next week, during LeWeb 09 edition.

Looking back at the past few months, I can insist on 2 points:

1. Pick the best co-founder: someone you trust, someone that complements you, someone that will be with you whether in good fortune or in adversity.

2. Build something: you have no excuse to not have a working beta before raising some funding. It took us two months with a single developer to have something we were not ashamed to share, and three months to get something really cool and scalable.

Now it's time to fine tune the last details before LeWeb. I'm leaving to Paris tomorrow. From this point onward I'll stick to a weekly blog post relating the events of that specific week.

Itamar Lesuisse