My idea for Jetlistings was to reinvent the Aircraft listing service by leveraging the digital marketing and SEO strategy to get greater exposure for the aircraft listed.  The existing listing sites were owned and run by old magazine publishing companies that were not well designed and did not leverage the benefits of the web technologies. I created and built a mobile responsive website that allowed video and provided backlinks to the aircraft that were listed on it.  The site was a clean design and was a lot better looking than the classic controller and other large sites.  But there was a problem.

The problem — The Brokers did not understand Digital Marketing.  Most did not know what SEO was and some had even outsourced their sites to the same magazine companies that were not leveraging the web trying to keep their legacy magazine industry alive.  I understand that some people are not technical do not understand the technology side but the other problem we found was much worse.

We found that many brokers were just lazy.  They would not even list their aircraft on the  free service.  Sadly many of them were just arrogant and lazy.  They would not spend the time to enter a free listing even though many of them were charging well over 100k to sell an aircraft.  This was not all the brokers but there were a lot of them.

The Solution — We quickly realized that our sales process must include educating brokers on web technology.  The problem was that most brokers are professionally insulated, meaning they have been in the same industry for decades and do not understand SEO and technology.  There were very few who could understand the technology to buy it but there were even less who could articulate the expense to an aircraft owner. The sales process was taking way too long so we PIVOTED.

We went back to our broker roots and now sell a Digital Marketing services to the aircraft owners directly.  Aircraft owners are generally smart successful people… it’s much easier to explain a complicated technical product to an owner than it is to a traditional broker.  If the owner has a local broker that they are working with then we will work for the owner but with the broker. If they are frustrated by the current broker then we can help as well with our discount brokerage service.  If we handle the brokerage then we will do it at a much lower price, and if not then we will refer them to another broker and just handle the marketing and advertising of the aircraft.  We are comfortable in either role.