The story of how Social Air came to be is really fascinating.
I (Dane Christensen) had been laid off from my job at an ecommerce company after spending 15 years in the Internet industry. I was in the process of trying to build my own web development and online marketing consultancy when I was approached by my friend and business partner Rich Benvin about an opportunity to help a start-up company named Jumpjet get their website migrated. Jumpjet was only days away from going live with their services offering private jet travel, and their web development company had built a terrible site that wasn’t ready to go live, and were planning to go on vacation during Jumpjet’s launch. I stepped into this crisis determined to come out a hero and secure a solid client that would last for years to come.
However, the further I dove into the project, the more I realized I was dealing with a catastrophe in the making. Once I’d had enough time to evaluate the code and the database, I realized that the previous developers had done horribly sloppy and convoluted work. Furthermore, it seemed that they didn’t really understand the business they were developing for. As this project which was originally supposed to last just ten days turned into weeks, I realized that the people running the business actually didn’t understand it either.
I quickly realized that their business model was fatally flawed. And in talking to the key staff the founder had hired, I learned that they also understood this, but that no one could reason with the founder, who was absolutely convinced that he had it all figured out. The core concept of Jumpjet is “Fly Private for the Price of First-class”. They’re marketing message was that they were offering private jet travel with all the convenience and time-savings of other private jet charter services at fraction of the cost. Their secret weapon was a secret algorithm that would allow them to get multiple members on the same flight, thereby sharing costs. The fact that members would have to travel with other Jumpjet members, however, was treated as a trade-off that was de-emphasized in the marketing material.
Worse, the founder was completely off—by an order of magnitude—in terms of what his minimum operating volume needed to be. He was planning to accommodate flights from anywhere, to anywhere in the U.S. within a few hours of their requested arrival times with a total membership of 1,500 people. Some basic analysis of the logistics based on the number of markets and average number of flights per year per member showed that they would need ten times that number of members in order to get multiple passengers on the same flights conveniently. With inadequate volume, they would be flying a lot of people around on solo trips and charging them only a fraction of what other private aircraft vendors were charging, and indeed of what they were paying for the aircraft. All I could do was watch in frustration as they launched their business and commenced flying passengers in what was clearly a death march.
However, I did witness them sell $4.5 million in memberships in the space of three days, and collect over $500,000 in actual fees for the first month. So if nothing else, they proved there was a market.
I had grown obsessed with the concept ‘semi-private jet travel’. I realized that the key was to take a completely different approach to the business. Rather than trying to be like every other private jet charter company that focuses on convenience, luxury, and prestige, they should tout the fact that you are travelling with other members as a positive feature rather than an inconvenience to be downplayed. After all, the closed quarters of a private jet is an inherently social environment. Why not capitalize on that? I began coming up with a lot of feature ideas to accentuate and take advantage of this aspect of the business. For a couple weeks I was intending to pitch these business ideas to the founder in order to get myself in a stronger position with them, and even to get some equity in the company. But in time I began to realize that they were not going to be open to any new ideas. Working with them on the business as I envisioned it was not an option.
Meanwhile, I had just spent six weeks completely consumed by this project and my financial life was crashing down around me. Completely out of money, I was scrambling to pay my bills, in part by working on the Jumpjet website. In between that, working for a few other web development and online marketing clients, and spending time with my daughters, I wrote this business plan, growing more certain with each page that this is multi-billion dollar business opportunity and more confident that we will be able to raise the capital to get this venture off the ground and soaring to amazing heights.