“Hey, I wanna rent a luxury ship, float it near the ass-end of Argentina for two weeks, fill it with rich people, scientists, and fancy food, and charge $14,000 per person…”
You’d look them in the eye and say:
“That sounds like a loss-making PowerPoint deck, not a business.”
And yet, it’s a thriving business.
Not just thriving. Booked-out-in-advance kind of thriving.
So what’s going on here?
A friend of mine actually did one of these cruises. Over the weekend, we spent nearly 50 minutes watching the documentary that was made about her trip. There were whales, glaciers, and scientists explaining the local ecosystems. It was surreal. She told a little behind-the-scenes things, like how they had to wear boots just to go ashore, and how the penguins didn’t even care that humans were standing a few feet away. The whole thing felt part safari, part TED Talk, part five-star resort. It made me realize: this isn’t just a vacation. It’s a very specific kind of dream.
And the part that’s hard to wrap your head around, especially if you’re used to building “normal” products, is that this is an extremely expensive idea targeted at a very narrow group of people. Renting a ship, getting a highly trained crew, bringing in scientists and chefs, coordinating excursions in places that barely have Wi-Fi? The logistics alone sound like a nightmare. And yet, they sell out.
So here’s the question I keep coming back to: did the cruise idea come first, or did they already know there were people willing to buy something like this?
Maybe it’s a mix of both. What’s clear is that the people behind this understood something deeply: there’s a group of travelers who don’t just want a vacation, they want an experience so rare, so curated, so immersive, that it feels like a story they’ll be telling for the rest of their lives. These aren’t tourists. These are explorers with credit cards.
And what they’ve built isn’t a mass-market cruise. It’s a floating, French-speaking, luxury classroom with wild animals as supporting characters. The ships are small, the staff is highly trained, and the destinations feel exclusive. That’s the product. That’s the value proposition.
What I find most fascinating is that they didn’t try to appeal to everyone. They aimed straight at the top, people who want education and elegance in the same sentence. And they priced accordingly.
For someone like me, who’s used to thinking about scale, affordability, reach, this breaks all the usual rules. But maybe that’s the lesson. You don’t always need to create something for millions of people. Sometimes, all you need is 100 people who really, really want what you’re offering, and are willing to pay for it.
This cruise wasn’t built to convince the masses. It was designed for the few who already knew they wanted something like it, even if they couldn’t quite describe it yet. That’s what a sharp, unique value proposition looks like. And for all its absurdity, it’s also kind of brilliant.
But...how do you even find these people?
