Comment by mi100hael | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mi100hael | Hacker News Reader

What's your goal with the project?

I built a web app that looked very similar a few years back: friends & family collaboration on a trip plan, itinerary with map view, packing list, notes/journaling, favoriting, private or public with commenting, that sort of thing.

My thesis was that the current common method of trip planning in a shared doc was messy, and a more structured, guided approach would make the process easier for users. And being able to share/show trip plans with others who aren't on the trip would be something people would want to do.

My goal was to scale it and get actual broad adoption, make it a social experience, but even getting a handful of users was an uphill battle.

I found that my thesis was likely wrong for a couple of reasons:

1. The messy shared doc approach had the benefit of being very low-friction. It's easier to just type a bulleted list than to click "add item" and fill out some form fields.

2. Browser usage was (I think) a limiting factor. I'm not sure if it would have worked as a native mobile app, but it definitely wasn't going to work as a web app.

3. When people want to show off their trip or look for travel inspiration, they turn to apps like Instagram and Tiktok. They want visuals with photos/videos, not a list with a map. It's very difficult to create a new purpose-built social network.

I ended up winding it down and moving on.

I don't mean this to be a Dropbox "why are you building this" comment, but more hopefully pointing out a few challenges that exist in the space that you'll likely need to think about if you want to scale.

Several things, but wide adoption is NOT one of them.

First and foremost, it's for my own personal use. I like to organize things and I find that the messy doc/spreadsheet way is way too messy for my liking, especially when I find a need to coordinate plans with other friends overseas. That's why I started this.

Secondly, it's for fun and for learning. I enjoy build websites and explore what browser can provide. I learned that browser have API for drag-and-drop element to pass data to a target element

So at the end of the day, I see it as a fun side project and nothing more.

Thanks for sharing your experience too :)

The landing page very much looks like a serious product looking for adoption, though. It might mislead users into thinking that it is intended to be something more than a fun side project.

Is there a harm in that, if it meets a user's requirements they can decide whether or not to use it, right?

A friend of mine built a similar thing as a mobile app and also failed to get adoption.

I think what these tools miss is that it’s kinda fun to plan a trip and I don’t necessarily need an app to help. It seems hard and like something I’ll need to learn once, and relearn when I need it again

Also I don’t want to plan out every second of my trips. Seems like this is useful for big trips with many people who need to be herded around, but in my estimation that kind of trip usually isn’t even that fun to begin with.

> The messy shared doc approach had the benefit of being very low-friction

This. If you want someone to use your thing, it needs to have a very strong value proposition over familiar general purpose tool.

This applies to basically every tool, but especially software.

I agree that anything that requires tripmates to make an account is going to be a hard sell for most groups. At least most people are already on Google Docs these days.

It's not clear to me how much of this requires an account, but I would encourage making as much as possible accessible without a login. Some people will want to help plan but there are also many people who just want to come along for the ride.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com