STARTUP STATE: LIFE wants to make hotel reservations for NFTs

LIFE

LIFE is an online booking platform that offers hotel reservations and experiences that will be digitized and converted into tradable, collectable NFTs.

Founded in 2022, LIFE claims it will be the first platform to make large volumes of hotel bookings available for trading on secondary markets.

What’s your 30-second pitch to investors?

LIFE is an online booking platform that offers hotel reservations and experiences that will be digitized and converted into tradable, collectable NFTs. Based on the AI ​​that now powers a major online travel agency, LIFE will launch with discounted prices on millions of hotels and experiences globally. LIFE will be the first platform to make large volumes of hotel bookings available for trading on secondary markets, just as baseball or Broadway tickets are today. By creating liquidity in bookings, both hotels and travelers will gain more flexibility and an improved travel experience.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

LIFE is a destination marketplace that offers travel and related products at prices better than even hotels can offer. Using NFTs that represent hotel stays, or tickets to movies, concerts, and other events, LIFE allows travelers to showcase where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’re going, and allows them to trade those bookings in an open marketplace.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

Strengthens: AI technology tailored for travel, proven crypto/NFT technology, team experience in travel, blockchain and financial services

Weaknesses: Need for more capital to increase our growth rate

Possibilities: $400 billion plus addressable market, legacy systems ripe for blockchain and Web 3 disruption, ability to address traditional travel markets as well as affluent younger travelers comfortable with NFTs and crypto

Threats: Slowdown in the global travel market, lack of liquidity in other NFT marketplaces which may affect our secondary volumes.

What are the pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer’s and the industry’s perspective?

Travel and entertainment are ripe for blockchain disruption; a blockchain booking solution can enable travel reservations and event tickets to be tokenized and transacted securely and seamlessly. Hotels welcome this solution as it helps them manage their revenue streams and solve the problem of high cancellation rates by creating bookings that can be traded on secondary markets instead of being canceled when travelers’ plans change.

So you have the product, now how are you going to get a lot of customers?

LIFE will use a network of influencers to monetize existing web traffic and generate initial hotel bookings quickly and at a higher than average conversion rate. We will offer unique hotels and experiences that will be difficult for others to replicate, and at favorable prices for our members. And we believe the ability to make the reservations tradable on the secondary markets will be attractive to many customers, especially if their plans change frequently.

Tell us what process you went through to establish a genuine need for your business and the size of the addressable market.

LIFE is at the intersection of travel and the blockchain, and our management team has many years of experience in handling travel agencies and finance. We solve a problem for travelers and hotels simultaneously by reducing friction in the hotel booking space, creating value from bookings that are currently dead assets.

How and when will you make money?

Our core technology platform is built and our business is highly scalable. We’ve been making money since we placed our first order, and we can adjust what portion of our revenue to keep and what percentage to put back into marketing to grow. We will also earn revenue from the sale of unique Passport NFTs, and from secondary trading on our marketplace which will scale as we bring more liquidity to the platform.

What is the background and past achievements of the founding team?

Eduardo Ibañez is a former chief researcher at Priceline.

Shawn Sloves is the CEO of Velocity Ledger and Fundamental Interactions (FI), a New York-based technology company that develops commercial electronic trading products and provides technology to major securities, derivatives and cryptocurrency exchanges globally.

David Shuler is co-founder and president of Y2X, formerly MD, Paxos; former MD and Head of Exchange Technologies, NYSE; MD, CME and Chief of Staff, Goldman Sachs.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion in your business?

The team is lean and eclectic. The founder, Eddie Ibanez, has a Latino background and we work with fearless coders in Ukraine.

What has been the hardest part of starting the business so far?

Finding the right people is always a challenge. Our leadership team has been fortunate to have great relationships within the travel and fintech space, and between our own networks and the contacts of our friends and advisors, we have been able to build a great organization.

Typically, travel startups have a pretty tough time making an impact – so why should you be one of the lucky ones?

Firstly, we meet a genuine customer and industry need in a huge market. Online travel alone is a $433 billion market and is projected to exceed $2 trillion by 2028. Sports and entertainment event tickets, an area we may get into later, is a $72 billion business, growing at 6.5% CAGR. After the forced closures of covid-19, these industries are rapidly recovering, as travelers seek new experiences and new opportunities.

Second, we represent a new way of booking travel that different customer demographics will find attractive. We accept payments via credit and debit cards, or in major cryptocurrencies. For some users, our NFTs will only represent the record of their reservations, while for others they will be collectibles. We want to make the platform fun and interesting to interact with by introducing games and quests with rewards that offer travel discounts, for example, and we can easily connect to Web 3 and metaverse environments.

In a year, what state do you think your startup will be in?

Our technology stack is built, we have access to millions of rooms of hotel inventory, and we’re establishing some great partnerships; we want to grow as fast as we can get customers. Through creative marketing and innovative products, we believe we can increase the total number of room stays and experiences booked at a lower customer acquisition cost than our competitors. We have aggressive but realistic forecasts that will get us to double-digit million revenues by the end of year one.

What is your end game? (Go public, acquisition, growth and stay private, etc.)

We are building an innovative, technology-driven company that will change the way people interact with the travel and entertainment industry and the way the industry interacts with customers. We create enormous value along the way, and we will be flexible on whether it leads to an IPO or M&A down the road.