Hello everyone, I am fairly new to the Travel Massive community and would like to ask for your help. Sorry for the long post.
I do a lot of things as a job from dog walking to building websites for clients to being a travel agent. But when I started to be a travel agent, I quickly started to dislike all of the SaaS tools out there made for travel agents. Lots are just outdated and lack innovation (in my opinion).
So this led me to start building a better CRM for travel agents called VoyagrCRM (voyagrcrm.com). I am still in the building stage for the MVP and I want to start building a waitlist of users that may be interested but I am running into a problem. All of the big travel agent communities on Reddit and Facebook have a no self-promotion rule. I have even reached out to the group owners and asked (because I am not promoting travel agent services, but a tool to help travel agents) and they still told me no.
So my question is, with little to no money for paid advertising and big social media communities not an option, how do I promote this new CRM?
Thanks in advance!
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Hi Justin,
There's a good reason online communities (including here) have a no self-promotion rule in their forums. Even the most well intentioned "self promotion" post sends a signal to everyone else that's it's ok to drop a link and run away without contributing anything back to the community.
Any good forum moderator will want to ensure content is high quality so people come back.
Second, if you are promoting a product that you want people to pay for (or you're going to profit from), then why should you expect a forum to give you free promotion?
There's lots of low cost options to promote a commercial venture in most communities, such as sponsoring a newsletter, or posting an classified ad.
Once you've launched your SaaS you are welcome to submit a post here on Travel Massive to get featured. This requires a bit more effort to put the post together, but it's a bit like presenting on a stage at a conference - you should be willing to put a bit of effort in, in return for being featured.
There's a comprehensive posting guide here if you go down that path:
www.travelmassive.com/pages/post-guide
Hope this feedback helps and perhaps other members here might have some suggestions.
Hi Ian,
Thank you for your thoughtful feedback; I truly appreciate it. I understand the need for communities to maintain high-quality content and the reasons behind the no self-promotion rules. My intention was never to disregard that but rather to find a way to connect with travel agents who might benefit from VoyagrCRM.
I completely agree that launching a product is a significant effort, and I’m committed to doing that properly. I will definitely consider the idea of contributing a high-quality post to Travel Massive once we launch. I’ll also explore low-cost options for promotion that align with community guidelines, such as sponsoring a newsletter or contributing useful content. But this may be difficult with a bootstrap budget, where I may not have $600 up front to spend on newsletter sponsoring.
If anyone in the community has suggestions for engaging with travel agents outside of self-promotion, I’d love to hear them. Thank you once again for your insights!
If you're in the US, then ASTA are a good network of travel advisors to get involved with. They also have an annual entrepreneur awards that you could apply for and get some funding!
Over here on Travel Massive you can get a premium membership for $49 and list your SaaS on our company directory: www.travelmassive.com/companies
I'd also recommend just getting along to events and conferences, to meet people in person!
Thanks for the info. I am in the US and I have been looking at travel associations and conferences. I will be attending some events.