Investing in Life Experiences
One day last Summer, as I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, I came across an interesting post. It was entitled “Invest in life experiences: Why you should buy less crap to be happier in life.”
This post had gotten quite a lot of shares, likes, and comments, and I found myself intrigued. As I read, I felt like everything the author wrote resonated with me. I had always been pretty adventurous and into new experiences, but I never really thought all that much about it.
The post talked about how “Experience defines us" and "stays with us” and that the key to happiness was spending our time and money experiencing life:
“The moment you purchase a material, not only does its monetary value drop in the marketplace, our perception of its value quickly fades over time. Experience can be relived. Experience has emotional longevity. It can be improved in our minds as we continue to grow and progress in life. It stays with us and they are lessons we can use every day for as long as we live.”
After reading the article, I of course liked it and shared it, and many of my friends liked and commented on it. I saved it in my Google doc of inspiring blogs and articles, and then kind of forgot about it.
Thinking about Business Ideas
Fast forward another 6 months to late December of 2014. It was during the Holidays, and I was wrapping up a job I held for only about 7 months. In the Internet startup world things don’t always work out, and that was the case here.
I decided that I wanted to take a little break from working for other people and build out a site of my own. I had been keeping a list of ideas for awhile, one of which was the “Experience” idea. Of course the business model wasn’t really fleshed out just yet.
I kept going over my list of various ideas and whittling it down, removing ideas that I didn’t think had a solid audience, or would be too difficult to scale, or that I just wasn’t passionate about. And pretty soon I found myself with about 3 ideas I really felt excited to pursue.
Unlikely Inspiration
That brings me to Facebook and how that fit into my inspiration. As I was looking at my Facebook feed, I started to realize how many people were engaging around posts related to experiences.
Trips, music festivals, food porn, selfies at the beach, going to baseball games, etc. And it wasn’t just a few likes or comments, it was significantly higher volume than your standard everyday posts about TV, commuting, politics, work, relationships, etc.
I thought “Why is this? Why are people so engaged around these experiences?” I hypothesized that people just really love doing fun, new, adventurous things. They love challenging themselves, getting out of their daily ruts, and expanding their horizons.
And more importantly they also love sharing those experiences with everyone, who in turn get excited for them. It’s kind of perpetual viral excitement (along with a little FOMO and jealousy of not being there).
Looking at the Numbers
It wasn’t just my anecdotal analysis. This piece from DailyMail looked at some statistics:
“A study by Facebook into the habits of users who have been on holiday in the last 12 months has found that travel is the dominant theme among posts and updates.
The social-media behemoth looked at the activity of 3000 regular users, and found that 42 per cent of stories on their timelines were tied in to travel – whether photographs uploaded on their last jaunt overseas, or simple day-dreaming about the need to get away.”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2517369/
Then there were these fascinating statistics from Travel Weekly:
"Eighty-four percent of Facebook users in the survey said that their friends' and families' holidays inspire them; 65% say that without Facebook they wouldn't know where their families have been on vacation.
Eighty-three percent said that they liked looking at photos of their friends' and families' vacations, even if they were not actively considering a vacation. Fifty-two percent said that when they're on Facebook they start dreaming about a vacation, even though they don't have one on the horizon."
These and other studies led Facebook to add their “Traveling To” feature.
A New Business Was Born
All of this evidence indicated to me that people really do cherish new and exciting life experiences. They love to travel, go to museums, eat at new restaurants, and be adventurous, and they love to share and talk about it with their friends and family.
And thus was born Experiencify!
As I research and write about interesting experiences for my readers, I find it almost as much fun inspiring them as I do actually having the experiences (almost as much). Here's to many new shared experiences for all of us!