Pinned post
For the last few months building in concierge/travel, I've been getting the same question repeatedly and haven't been able to cleanly answer it: what's the business model?
It comes up because we've been wired to think about consumer businesses in 2 ways:
1/ Service Provider
2/ Aggregators
Service Providers (or brands) are the actual products for consumers. Aggregators sit on top and scale by solving ops, logistics, and discovery (friction, essentially) for them. Think Magnolia Bakery as the Service Provider, and Zomato as the aggregator (with productized convenience).
Concierge doesn't fit either. They technically don't own any part of the value chain that delivers the experience. That's the DMC's job in travel. And aggregators already exist there too: MakeMyTrip and Scapia let you book those services online, solving discovery. So where does concierge sit? Not in either bucket.
Concierge is built on curation. And curation is built on deep user context. So "aggregator" doesn't quite describe it. This is the next phase of consumer: "curated convenience" of sorts, where the product does what you want without making you carry the load.
The clearest way to understand it is Claude or ChatGPT. Blogs and sites are the service providers. Search engines are the aggregators. OpenAI and Anthropic are the contextual engine on top, enabling curation at scale for everyone.
This will be the default. Massive opportunity. But there's still no clean term for the model itself. Curation aggregator? Curator? Idk.
The business itself could differ. Memberships, per-service requests, etc.
It comes up because we've been wired to think about consumer businesses in 2 ways:
1/ Service Provider
2/ Aggregators
Service Providers (or brands) are the actual products for consumers. Aggregators sit on top and scale by solving ops, logistics, and discovery (friction, essentially) for them. Think Magnolia Bakery as the Service Provider, and Zomato as the aggregator (with productized convenience).
Concierge doesn't fit either. They technically don't own any part of the value chain that delivers the experience. That's the DMC's job in travel. And aggregators already exist there too: MakeMyTrip and Scapia let you book those services online, solving discovery. So where does concierge sit? Not in either bucket.
Concierge is built on curation. And curation is built on deep user context. So "aggregator" doesn't quite describe it. This is the next phase of consumer: "curated convenience" of sorts, where the product does what you want without making you carry the load.
The clearest way to understand it is Claude or ChatGPT. Blogs and sites are the service providers. Search engines are the aggregators. OpenAI and Anthropic are the contextual engine on top, enabling curation at scale for everyone.
This will be the default. Massive opportunity. But there's still no clean term for the model itself. Curation aggregator? Curator? Idk.
The business itself could differ. Memberships, per-service requests, etc.
