Case · Founding team · Product and go-to-market
Hoply: the growth half of a founding team.Answers before the lease.
A pre-revenue European aviation startup planned scheduled flights on eight-seat aircraft. From February to June 2026 Igor Levi worked inside its founding team as Founding Team Advisor / Fractional CPMO and led the whole product-marketing and growth side with the Eightception team, while the founders worked on the aircraft and the operator.
- The engagement
- Four months, February to June 2026
- The paid test
- 26 Meta campaigns, March – April 2026
- The outcome
- Clear answers before any aircraft was leased
IThe situation
An airline-shaped business with no aircraft yet.
Hoply planned scheduled flights on eight-seat Pilatus PC-12 turboprops between European city pairs. No owned fleet – aircraft wet-leased from existing operators. The pitch was €500–1,000 a seat and three to five hours saved door to door against commercial hubs and their transfers.
The company had no revenue and no aircraft, and the lease was the largest commitment in front of it – the one that could not be undone cheaply. Everything that faces a customer was still a thesis: who buys, at what fare, on which routes, and told what story.
IIIgor's role
Founder-level work across product and growth.
Igor worked at founder level as Fractional CPMO, with the customer-facing side of the business as his remit: product marketing, positioning, audience research, narrative, campaign design, analytics, unit economics and brand.
He brought in the Eightception team – brand and UX designers and analysts. The company's ad team ran the campaigns; Igor designed the tests, wrote the hypotheses and narratives they carried, and read the results.
February
A route-prioritization model on public flight and fare data: 46 routes across 25 cities, scored on market size, time saved and distance fit.
March
A section-by-section review of both landing pages before the first campaign went live. Audience research that mapped 47 buyer mindsets and profiled 26 of them in depth. The brand core, positioning and six audience segments. The paid demand test. Interviews with leads and industry experts. Two route analyses rebuilt on live campaign data. A unit-economics model – 36 months, 22 routes, two aircraft, with scenarios – a purchase-intent model and a plan for validating product–market fit.
April
A set of strategic narratives for the campaigns. Hands-on testing of the new booking and checkout flow. A competitive-intelligence report on European semi-private aviation, built on a March post-mortem of the closest predecessor in the same model.
May
After the company changed direction, the go-to-market was rebuilt for corporate buyers: nine segments in three tiers, 18 deep audience maps – six of them for the gatekeepers a corporate deal has to pass, from the finance director to procurement, legal and the works council – a revised set of narratives, and a new brand identity from the Eightception team, with artwork for a print placement in a private-aviation magazine.
IIIHow Igor worked
One hypothesis at a time, each with a way to be wrong.
Price the question
The paid test did not measure interest in the idea. It asked for a booking request – a route, a date and a fare – on real city pairs, so that the answer would be about buying.
Distrust the good number
A lead at a fraction of the target cost looks like a win. Igor's report called it suspiciously low and read it as a sign that the audience was broader than the buyer.
Name the weak spots
The report that showed the strong numbers also said where they were weak: some leads could not be traced to the ad that brought them, and many people left only an email address, without asking for a flight.
IVWhat the evidence said
Booking requests at the fare – from a buyer the plan had not started with.
- ad spend across 26 Meta campaigns
- about €8,600
- impressions
- about 790,000
- booking requests with a route, a date and a fare in March alone
- nearly 800
- fares on those requests
- €400–990
London–Paris drew about half of the booking requests, ahead of Geneva–Paris, Nice–Paris and Milan–Paris. The first twenty customer interviews split about 70% leisure to 30% business: private travelers – second homes, families, pets, holidays – rather than the business commuter the plan had started from.
The caveats travel with the numbers.
- The cost per lead was far below any benchmark for premium travel. Igor's own reading at the time: the audience was probably broader and less qualified than intended.
- About two thirds of sign-ups were waitlist entries – an email address and no intent data. The booking requests are the part that says something about buying.
VThe next step
A plan for the private buyer, then a test of the corporate one.
Igor's plan for the private buyer was to narrow to the smallest set of routes and markets worth testing, fix the site, keep direct sales going, run the campaigns – top of funnel and retargeting – long enough to work, add organic content and email, and give paid media a budget in the range of 10–15 thousand a month.
His argument was about how this buyer decides. A stranger does not go from one banner to a €900 booking in a day, and nobody invents a trip in order to try a new airline. People who like the idea need weeks to warm up, and direct sales get harder without marketing running in the background.
In May the company decided to test a second market – corporate clients, with regular group flights of four to eight people sold to companies. Igor rebuilt the go-to-market for it, and the hypothesis was put to interviews.
42 interviews, April to June
The company's business-development lead ran the interview program. Twenty-six corporate interviews did not confirm the corporate hypothesis, and the reason was structural: there is no regular weekly group traffic of four to eight people on one route, senior managers deliberately do not fly on one aircraft, and the corporate decision cycle runs six to nine months.
The private segment
Sixteen private interviews found paying demand in a gap nobody serves. Business class costs €400–800 and a full charter €18,000–34,000; these travelers will pay €3,500–5,000 for a direct return flight with no hub and no transfer. Six pre-orders were confirmed, and three partner channels were ready to supply clients – confirming the private traveler as the strongest demand.
An unprompted request, weeks later
After the work had stopped, a former interview contact asked for a flight on specific dates in August – with a dog, four bags and two golf bags, on a route that had never been advertised.
VIHow it ended
A hard market, and a decision to close before the lease.
No aircraft was leased. The founders closed the project before the first commercial flight, in a market Eightception's research had shown to be very hard.
The Eightception team's competitive research in April had mapped how hard the category is. No scheduled by-the-seat operator served the gap between European business class and a full charter. Europe had claimed every by-the-seat startup that tried it: one operator withdrew from Europe in 2023, and the closest predecessor in the same wet-lease model collapsed in May 2025. Every failed company in that research had been undercapitalized.
In a market like that, closing before the lease is signed is one of the good endings a startup can have. The answers arrived before the most expensive and least reversible commitment in front of the company.
“Igor, great work! Really very interesting. As always, deep.”
How to start
Find out what the evidence saysbefore the money moves.
Answer a few short questions about where things stand. The conversation ends with the smallest useful next step – or a plain reason it is not Igor.