Tokyo Concierge
Tokyo Concierge was born out of a desire to have an EA (Executive Assistant) in places where I travel to. I like commnicating via text and just love the luxury of asking for a 'good okonomiyaki place in Ebisu for 4, tomorrow eve' and then get a few options, or a reservation.
While mulling this over and discussing this with a few people in my network, pretty much everyone went straight to chatbots, llm's etc. I decided to go the other way and add in a few other requirements (itches) I wanted to scratch:
- Create human, part time jobs for people who are normally outside of the regular worker pool
- Launch the venture in a few days or shorter, i.e. no 6 month build before launch
- Profitable from day one
- Yes to advanced tooling, but only used by the concierges. Customer always communicates with a human
The result was tokyoconcierge.com, and it's been amazingly successful. Since launch we've helped 100's of visitors and made their visit to Tokyo and Seoul so much more pleasurable. Roughly 30% of our new customers are referrals from customers and our repeat rate is roughly 20%.