Okay. It would be worth mentioning that now. E.g. "free signup for the first 2 years". Otherwise it feels like a bait and switch.
Regarding the percentage: have you broken down the costs of everything you need to pay for, and still make enough of a profit that it's worth someone's time investing? That would be useful to an investor.
Yes but everyone wants to offer better customer service. In order for that to be your advantage you have to actually be doing that or have a concrete way of doing that in a way that Airbnb isn't doing already. For example, take Netflix (streaming) vs Blockbuster. Netflix wasn't simply Blockbuster but with some things done differently. It was Blockbuster to the end user in that it satisfied the same purposes, but was implemented completely differently so that Blockbuster basically would have had to start from scratch to do things the same way as Netflix.
This is probably one of the most common early founder mistakes I saw in my time in SF (from mostly myself) which is that a founder would think that they could magically say they will improve on some aspect of incumbent, and expect others to just believe that they can execute on it.
Example: We'll be like YouTube, but with better recommendations... Uber but with less assaults. Doordash but with less missing items in orders.
The shortcomings of incumbent offerings are often well known. Simply recognizing them and saying your company will solve them is not in itself an innovation, unless you can actually present a non-obvious solution, and one that is also defendable. For example, even if you recognize that Doordash makes a lot of mistakes in orders, and you come up with a solution such as "hire more quality control personnel," it's not anything that Doordash would have a hard time doing themselves if you prove that it works in a way that solves the problem. It has to still be defendable in a way like proprietary technology or know-how that you have. If you don't have something like that, you'd essentially have to convince investors that you will be able to execute against the competitors better which is a tough sell with anything except traction showing that whatever execution/tactics you have are already working in some way.
In short, if you're raising money on just here's my idea, your idea better be something compelling enough to patent. If not, better get your hands dirty and have traction.
- Who pays the visitors if the place is locked/unavailable/trashed when the visitors arrive?
- How do (or will) you make money?