Ask HN: We built a travel app – a classic tarpit idea. What now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: We built a travel app – a classic tarpit idea. What now?

4 pointskenforthewin7 comments

We built TripJam, a collaborative travel app with deep AI integration: https://tripjam.app/

For context, we're a group of friends who decided to build a travel app after being frustrated with planning our travel across group chats, Google Maps, spreadsheets, and other tools. We've spent a lot of time polishing the app to include modern group chat features, deep AI integration with function calls to manage your trip end to end, and publishing a mobile app on iOS. But we're very new to the startup space and are learning as we go - we made the double whammy mistakes of building something before validating the idea with potential customers, and building in an overly saturated space that will be a constant uphill battle to acquire and maintain users.

We're looking for advice on next steps - potential pivots, growth hacks, anything really. Hoping for brutal honesty!

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IMO, you shouldn't try to replace chat apps. People already feel scattered across multiple chat apps.

Focus on integrating well with existing chat apps for the chat functionality. Make it easy to pull info from your app into a group chat in whatever chat app. Don't make everyone have to join yet another chat system just to plan a group trip.

Well... at least you're self-aware. Cool travel collaboration things were probably old hat when I was working on one [1] in 2005. :P

I left the travel industry in 2011, but if any of my knowledge still applies, and you want to make some money... you need to do things to drive hotel bookings.

You probably need a catalog of hotels and places to visit anyway to help users plan things. But make sure you have a way for your users to book those hotels and you to get a commission. Make sure you're making landing pages for people to find with search engines. You'll probably want/need to pay to get people into those same landing pages, so you'll need to be tracking revenue at a very granular level, so you can bid higher on the pages that make you more money, and less (or not at all) on the pages that don't. And if you're in multiple commission programs (which you should be), you can be sure to highlight the ones that make you more money.

You may want to have something t help your users make airplane and car bookings too, but those margins are slim, so work on hotels first.

[1] https://lifehacker.com/yahoo-trip-planner-100875

Decent execution! Congrats on putting it before public's eyes. How long did it take for you piece this together?

As a user, I have no strong reason why I should register.

> validating the idea with potential customers, and building in an overly saturated space that will be a constant uphill battle to acquire and maintain users.

The first time around, I missed even checking the bottom half of your landing page, which seem to have more information about what the app is targeting to be about. Reading it gave the me the vibe of being part of a community or a group, but reading this text above made me think if I'm merely a wallet for you. My 2c to you is to focus on building a community than a business. Once there is a community, commerce follows.

AI travel… agent? I think if you can make a spiffy interface and surface suggestions as well as deals, it might be a huge value add. Travel itineraries are difficult. Could also get into the booking space.

How big is the friends planning travel together market?

Don’t get me wrong, it is great that you scratched your own dog food.

But it doesn’t seem like a significant problem for experienced travelers, business travelers, family travelers or tour operators…most travel planning doesn’t involve thinking “I wish I had a chat app.”

We're looking for advice on next steps - potential pivots, growth hacks, anything really.

The important thing you built is a team who can complete a project together. There are no generic growth jacks, everything requires very specific hard work.

The best thing the team can do is build something else together. The team is what matters. Good luck.

I can see some potential value add in this space. Whenever you're going somewhere new and/or you don't already know your exact itinerary upfront, you would (nowadays) typically ask an AI bot for recommendations, and those are typically poorly integrated, and often AI will suggest places that don't exist, are closed etc., then you have to manually book them. I haven't checked travel apps space lately, but I believe there's room here to deliver a more seamless experience. Getting users is going to be the hard part.

Getting users is going to be the hard part.

It is certainly a hard part, but delivering value to those users will be even harder.

Because delivering value will require an LLM with expertise on every place a person might want to travel and delivering useful answers to people with arbitrary tastes/desires/needs/itineraries/etc.

Some times for some people in some places "McDonalds" is just the right recommendation about where to eat. If you are at Exit 47 at 9pm it could be the best option. If you are in the French Quarter at 3pm, it probably isn't.

So how do you pay for good answers for everyplace in the world? Even Google struggles with that.

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