Hardwired Control Matrix
It has been a challenging month at Social Flights. Our soft launch story was broken by FAST COMPANY, then it was quickly picked up by THE NEW YORK TIMES, BLOOMBERG TV, FORBES, INC. TECH, WASHINGTON POST, and MASHABLE, then picked up by various other magazines and bloggers across the web.
Huge Interest in The Business Model
Social flights picked up tens of thousands of hits and several thousand members within a very short period of time. We also received almost a thousand RFQ’s for charter service and our web traffic rank according to Alexa.com is under 20,000 – better than any other private jet broker in the country, including NetJets.
I personally communicated with dozens of 3rd party entrepreneurs that want to plug into our value proposition and we are discussing multiple high value partnerships in North America and around the world.
Are We Hard Wired?
Introducing such a radical approach brings many challenges, especially in the area of customer expectation. People are hard wired to schedules, and lines, and pat downs, and waiting, waiting waiting. Social Flights was never conceived to dictate on a market how they should fly and to where. Social flights will certainly not take people someplace where they don’t want to go – like an airport hub for transfer. Social Flights will never hold a passenger’s dignity hostage behind some hidden cost or irrelevant regulation.
Losing The Hard Wire
We estimate that Social Flights will optimize at about 2.5 Million members – or roughly 5000 people in each of 500 locations across North America. At that point our service model will begin to “simulate” the selection and convenience of the commercial airlines. Keep in mind – this system will “simulate” scheduled service except without hard wires.
5000 people X 500 places model
- This is the point where there will be a high likelihood that 8-10 people will all want to go to the same place from the same place within reasonable intervals of departure times.
- This is the point where fluctuations in price and schedule such as de-icing costs, landing fees, fuel cost, or seat cancellation policy can be absorbed across the whole system rather than an individual passenger load.
- This is the point where ground support vendors will commit substantial discount incentives to controlled bundles of passengers.
- This is a point where the data that is generated by The Value Game and held solely by the players becomes valuable enough to predict the outcomes of future Value Games.
Not An Easy Puzzle to Solve:
Social Flights is attempting to do something that has never been accomplished in social media with such high value shared assets. We seek to answer the question: Can people organize themselves around the concept of “Value” much like we have organized ourselves around the concept of “Money”. Based on our earliest readings, the answer is that people are not as Hard Wired to money as those who control money would like us to believe. Looks like they’d jump the first plane out of Dodge if given a chance.
