Why Reddit's Founder was "Terrified" to Launch New Startup, Hipmunk (YC S10) | Hacker News Reader

Why Reddit's Founder was "Terrified" to Launch New Startup, Hipmunk (YC S10)

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61 pointschcameron21 comments

"hipmunk" (I really hate domain squatters if this is best URL you guys could find available?) looks good, but I wonder if it's all flash 'agony' and name recognition (hey you got cnn to write an article already, sweet hook up!). As far as I can tell it has a pretty 'info graphic' interface, but doesn't really do the thing that would get me to use it: save money on flights.

Does hipmunk do anything different? It doesn't look like it can tap into sabre, ryan air db, etc, looks like it just scrapes and organizes, nor does it look like it has any fancy back end db of extensive flight info with a smart heuristics engine to predict future prices. So, beyond help those who have trouble visualizing a schedule, I'm not sure how this is any better than farecast et all. Can hipmunk predict if a particular flight's price (not willy nilly flights, I'm looking at you farecast) will go up or down?

That's a bit unfair to judge a recently graduated startup on its current face value. I am sure they have more under the hood a-brewin'. They already solved my pain indirectly for group travel - I was screen sharing with my friends and the layout helped us figure out a time much faster! I do hope there could be some sort of group travel exploration feature down the road a la chat or group search :-)

"Hipmunk" is a cool pun - it's a hip c'hipmunk' (or could be Hip Monk :-p) Either way, it's much more personified with the mascot (like the Reddit alien) than vowel dropping startups.

It may not the best URL available for what they currently do. I just did a 5-minute IDS check and pickfly.com (WAY better IMHO) is available, for example.

But see, then they would get "stuck" to the market they're starting in, would lose having a Google-unique name and would probably even have to fight their way up to the first result in travel's very-cutthroat SEO environment.

There are so many trade-offs that are hard to evaluate from the outside that I'm a lot more understanding of "weird" names (typified by the notorious Google example) than I used to be.

"...secure funding from both Y Combinator and a group of angles including Ron Conway."

Angles. Angles including Ron Conway.

Conway is a very acute angle. Other angles outside the valley might be quite obtuse.

Angles form a group under angle addition. If Ron there is a 45' angle, the group includes him.

angles give them an edge

if there were 3, hipmunk would have tri-angels... it looks like the article updated the spelling =)

Aah, the penny drops. (Hipmunk site was top of reddit a few days back). It looks great, but it would be amazing if they could incorporate Ryanair, Easyjet, Fueling and German Wings.

Hmm. I have really complicated itineraries and so far it looks like ITA's matrix search only not as flexible/powerful. It has potential, though.

A ton of people request this. We're working on it.

I would also add Southwest to that list. The reason I don't use sites like Orbitz, Travelocity, etc... isn't because they are hard to use it's because Southwest is nearly always the cheapest and they don't jerk you around. I once bought a flight on Continential over Southwest to save literally 4 dollars. I've never been so sorry about a purchasing decision in my life. Long story short Continential was so bad I never actually made it onto their flight I ended up booking a Southwest flight instead. After that I don't even check any sites except Southwest.com anymore for domestic travel.

But from what little I know, you also aren't allowed to list Southwest prices on other online booking aggregators. Our company travel site makes us open their site separately to check prices for this reason (I think -- it seems highly unlikely to be a technical incompatibility).

I wrote my own client-side multi-flight planning app about four years ago, using web scraping to include Ryanair, Easyjet and others, in order to plan a cheap vacation. A particular problem with Ryanair is, I believe, that they are explicitly against any kind of disintermediation or technology-enabled price competition.

You cannot scrape their prices because they keep bumping them by a cent for each N tickets (so they can say that "only N seats left for X euro, book now before it's too late" all the time), and also because you cannot reliably reverse engineer all their random fees.

Actually, I can scrape the prices, because it was my personal client, only ever run by me, with fresh prices confirmed by faking a run through the booking process.

www.skyscanner.com includes Ryanair and other cheap airlines. At least at some point they did :)

I like the service. But I wonder, what is their business model?

Speculating, I'd say reap referral revenue. Orbitz has a program http://www.orbitz.com/App/Affiliate, and hipmunk can probably negotiate better at some point. For an acquirer: drive sales.

Oh, there are a few segments where traffic is money, and it's not hard to work out a deal to convert it. Travel is one of them. Visitors are usually ready to become customers somewhere so it's not hard to get referral fees.

I loved the story at the first SS from TripAdvisor co-founder Langley Steinert about how they got their first referral deal. They simply got permission from Expedia to start sending them free traffic, no strings attached. After they did that for a couple weeks, they just turned off the spigot... and soon got a call from Expedia asking them where the traffic went and how to bring it back. Expedia later bought TripAdvisor. If only it were always so easy...

Kinda feels like Kayak. I do like the "previous searches" tabs.

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