This weekend I participated as a designer in Techstars Startup Weekend Stockholm. My team and I worked on ‘Standby’, a service that offers last-minute tickets for underbooked flights within Scandinavia. After an intensive weekend, we won the first price (yay!). In this blog post, I will share what we created and reflect a little bit on our user validation.
Back in the day, the best way to get last minute flights was to arrive at the airport and ask for a standby ticket. Nowadays, sales take place online and the majority of airlines have closed their ticket offices at airports. On weekdays between 10 am and 4 pm have 50-60% of the seats on flights within Scandinavia are empty which results in lost revenue and a higher cost and CO2 emission per passenger. And that’s were Standby comes in. Standby offers a self-service solution for students to reserve last minute tickets that would otherwise go unsold – at a heavily discounted price.
Visualising and validating a service
One of the greatest things about Startup Weekend is access to a wide network of companies and experts. We co-created a mixture of a service blueprint and customer journey with representatives from SAS, TUI fly, Aeroflot and BRA airlines which allowed us to discover weaknesses and opportunities.
With these learnings, we created the first proof-of-concept to validate customer interest. In a few hours, two developers and
We ran some Instagram ads targeted towards students in Stockholm that lead to Standby’s landing page. After half a day, we got a handful of people that went through the entire booking flow and around 75 people signed up for our newsletter.
Investors and winning
At the end of the event, we pitched our results to different investors and the Stockholm startup scene. While the competition was quite fierce, we ended up first place and are now invited to the headquarters of two major airlines. Furthermore, a nice article was written in a Swedish newspaper which you can read here (it’s in Swedish though..). I am really grateful for this opportunity, the team and I am looking forward to wherever this may take me. It’s beyond amazing what you can do within two days!
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I am passionate about inclusion and actively participated in design and research projects across the world. I joined a project that was initiated by Philips Healthcare in Shanghai and collaborated on smart parenting solutions.