Kyle
Indiana startup Tourize is working on a new way to travel. Where most travel apps focus on booking flights or hotels cheaply, Andrew Heil, founder of Tourize, wants to put the “tour” back into travel.
“We believe that often times knowledge is missing as each tourist experiences a new attraction or is planning a new trip.’ Heil told nibletz.com in an interview. They’re currently accelerating in the “RunUp Labs, the travel technology accelerator which runs through demo day on May 10th.
RunUp Labs is part of a new wave of vertical accelerators, that many accelerator proponents feel is the model to go with. This accelerator only caters to startups in the travel sector and as such they can refine their mentors.
” It’s been great. My team and I have been working around the clock and of course learning a whole lot.” Heil said about RunUp Labs and the program they offer.
So how do you get people to sign up for a beta of a startup that’s doing things differently, especially if you’re based “everywhere else”. Well you do what it takes to create excitement and buzz and in the case of Tourize that means taking advantage of the NCAA tournament with their Madness in March sign up promotion.
Heil said “I thought if “Hipster” could get 10k signups with just a launch page and mailbox app could make a que of 600k signups, certainly I could make madness in march happen!”
“And it’s starting to – we launched on Sunday 3/24 and have already passed 1,000 page views rather quickly in the first 5 hours. We’ve continued to that rate and are at 2,500 page views in the first 36 hours. After reaching out to people who have signed up, people are interested in the hype of a new way to travel and of course, being part of the tournament!” Heil continued.
Tourize is tweeting out the tournament stats via their Twitter feed @tourizeapp.
They will shortly narrow down the field to see who the final four early adopters of Tourize are.
You can find out more about Tourize here.
