When An Accidental Feature Becomes Your Entire Business | Hacker News Reader

When An Accidental Feature Becomes Your Entire Business

forbes.com

106 pointssethbannon48 comments

> Wong and her five-person team often jumped in to directly ask customers what they were looking for, then went out and organized trips themselves.

So they've basically re-invented what a travel agent used to do, over the internet?

You could describe almost any business with a snarky remark like that. Github: basically re-invented your sysadmin putting up a CVS server, over the internet; Stripe: basically re-invented what a bank used to do, over the internet.

Anyway, this is one of those things that works much much better on the internet. In the bad old days, a travel agent was the only option for booking flights and trips. Now that you can do it all over the internet, I doubt there's a market to support that many travel agents: the occasional honeymooners and niche travelers.

But the internet is great at turning niche ideas into massive businesses. If there are only thousands of people in your city who need this per year, you'd barely support a travel agency. But if there are thousands in your city, and also in every other city, that's a billion dollar business.

Adding the internet into the mix doesn't make anything better. The reason why this "website" grew was because of the human aspect.

Regarding travel agents: when I booked my honeymoon, my travel agent was able to get me a better price than an hour on the internet. Not only that, but she was even able to personally recommend hotels and activities.

> when I booked my honeymoon, my travel agent was able to get me a better price than an hour on the internet

As an aside, I'm guessing you flew internationally for your honeymoon? International pricing is done totally differently from domestic, which is why typical travel websites like Expedia can't find the best price.

Yes, your guess is correct. Also, we're not talking about $5, we're talking a few hundred dollars for the whole trip.

Disagree: the internet makes all the difference because it can scale to a much greater market. You can serve a market of millions instead of thousands.

My point about travel agents is that honeymoons are niche. You'll hopefully have one, ever.

I think you misunderstood my comment regarding the internet. Many people think that just having a website will magically triple their business revenue. That's plainly not true.

The internet is a medium. Just as any medium used to deliver and communicate to users, you have to utilize it correctly.

Don't forget to head down to the patent office after you tack on your "but on the Internet". Finally your snark can score you some serious coin.

You also need to prefix "apparatus and algorithm for" because mathematics "aren't patentable".

But "business methods" are.

>Github: basically re-invented your sysadmin putting up a CVS server, over the internet; Stripe: basically re-invented what a bank used to do, over the internet.

Those don't even sound snarky, in my opinion. Those both seem like valuable services.

The snark is the implication they didn't actually do anything particularly special or unique.

Would you say they did something that doesn't scale?

http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

The first Airbnb room was the founders' pad in SF.

Yeah, they are the first people to help out and organize trips for their customers, but I can see this eventually becomes a marketplace for other travel agents to use.

Sounds a bit more like a travel agent exchange, which seems super-valuable, especially as they build enough of a data set to intelligently match the right travelers with the right agents, and to deal with agents who receive poor feedback scores.

This seems specific to custom tours though - travel agents only take care of standard things like cruises, hotels, cars, flights, etc. in my experience.

It depends. A lot of the group adventure travel companies, for example, will arrange private trips for which they can take advantage of the expertise, local knowledge, relationships, etc. that come from running standardized group trips. But those are often setup around having guides. (But not necessarily.)

The big challenge is sort of touched on in the article. At the end of the day, most of the agent's money needs to come from hotel etc. commissions. It's hard to charge people a lot for planning a trip--at least to the degree that it's exposed as a discrete line item.

I never use travel agents for standard things (hotels/flights/cars) and only hire them for long, complex itineraries (2 countries, 8 cities in Asia over 4 weeks, etc.).

Both Conde Nast Traveler and Travel+Leisure Magazine publish A-List or "Gold List" travel agents who specialize in a certain region... These are not the guys that work in your local shopping centre or mall.

True, but what you described are still collections of standard things, not bespoke tours of the kind that this company seems to be doing.

What's the distinction you're drawing here? Surely anything that could possibly be booked over the internet would ultimately be a "standard" thing, and so any "bespoke" tour arranged by internet reduces to a "collection of standard things".

I think the main thing is they still function as a marketplace, but the goods now are not prepackaged tours, but travel guide as a service and of course some commission on the package itself too.

This definitely scales better than a local travel guide office. I am not convinced that alone will sustain growth though. There will be a lot of issues once they grow past a certain size: quality control for one, fraud, customer experience, etc.

Sounds like a great idea to me.

Please, if someone from forbes.com is reading this, please disable the full page ad for readers coming via HN. Ghostery counts 15 different types of trackers, and there are many ads on the page itself.

Fat chance of that happening with all the money they're making from it:

http://adage.com/article/digital/real-money-online-advertisi...

These kind of untargeted display ads are amongst the lowest ROI ads online, but advertisers still seem all too happy to pony up vast sums for them. They call it "branding", I think.

Sigh. Just use Firefox and NoScript. And "clear history when Firefox closes". Close Firefox on occasion. Voila, no full page ad.

The Internet will not change its business model to please you. It's you who will need to change your behavior.

On the computer, these blockers are readily available. On the iPad, however, they are not (chrome for ios, for example, doesn't support any of those extensions)

Okay, thanks for the clarification. I see your point. I didn't think of the iPad because, although I have one, I don't do much general browsing with it. E.g. I use the Bloomberg app to connect to their site, rather than use Safari.

I surf very little on my iPhone, a bit on my iPad, almost all on my Macbook. Why? Because of screen area. I love being able to crank the font size up to 18 points and still be able to see a decent amount of screen real estate.

Just something to look forward to as you get older. :)

It's a sad state of affairs when you're basically at war with the content providers. They want all sorts of metrics, and you pay for it in terms of processing, bandwidth and certainly not least your own privacy.

Then there's the issue with Ghostery itself being owned by Evidon. http://www.businessinsider.com/evidon-sells-ghostery-data-to...

Then there's the issue with Ghostery itself being owned by Evidon.

I think this is more heat than light. The "Ghost Rank" functionality, whereby anonymous usage data is uploaded to Evidon is opt-in with recent versions of Ghostery, and they have to pay for the engineers that created the tool and keep it up to date somehow...

I switched to disconnect.me a while back because I have a cynical view of a tracker blocker tracking people, even if there is the option to disable it.

And for similar reasons I dropped AdBlock when they decided to let companies pay to be unblocked.

RequestPolicy FTW - unlike those other plugins, it is a whitelisting system so nobody slips through just because they are new. It is also site-specific, so if you want to load up disqus from one site but not any others, you can.

https://www.requestpolicy.com/

Downside? You have to be more involved by manually whitelisting the necessary sites like CDNs. I've been using it for years and it doesn't bother me, although I'd say 5% of the time I'll just give up rather than work through a list of 10+ cross-site references.

Thank you! I much prefer whitelisting, but had not known about this one.

It's a nice idea that people could simply start themselves up as a tour guide for x (Oxbridge dons apparently make good beer money touring colleges and quoting Coleridge)

However like a lot of these connect the world to one person ideas, the money is scant. They even admit most of their revenue will come from hotel bookings - so despite the YC, despite the new paradigm for marketplaces and providers, it's just a new hook for Hilton hotels.

I have a sneaking suspicion that vast amounts of the value and wealth being created by the Internet is effective unmonetisable - affiliates and ads will only stretch so far.

This is actually another regulated area: in many places, to legally be a guide for a group you need to have some kind of education or certification.

Most Oxbridge dons have some kind of education.

;-)

But iirr the idea is existing tour guides can do it without their current agency getting involved.

I'd like to know what it takes to get an advertorial like that in Forbes? What PR company did Vayable use, how much did they charge? What other forms of PR did they get out of the deal? How effective was it (may not be answerable in this case, at least not yet)?

I wouldn't call this an advertorial, but there are some key points you need to "pitch" to get Forbes interested. 1) business metrics. in this case it was the MoM sales jump. 2)something timely/ what we call "newsworthy". Again, in this case, Vayable pivoted and launched a new site design. 3) A competent spokesperson that has a good "twist". Vayable's went with the "happy accident" theme

Are you saying there was no (compensated) intermediary between Vayable and Forbes? Did they just spam every news site with a press release and hope for a bite?

> Wong says that going forward the company will take a 15-30% commission on hotel bookings

I doubt they will be able to get that much - I think the going rate on any number of online booking sites is 10% or less ... its highly competitive.

My impression is that they are trying to market themselves not as cost-savers but as providers of unique experiences. That takes all those other sites out of the running.

A few years back I had a revelation when I read a study of satisfaction among automobile buyers - the customers who paid the most had the highest rates of satisfaction. If you can tap into that sort of customerbase than there is a lot of profit to be made.

Bit.ly has some similar story. Tough it was not a accidental feature.

Paul Graham has 2 Forbes Reporters On his Payroll. Don't take my word for it, check out the authors of the AirBnB, DropBox and other "Stories" for last 4 years and you'll see who they are.

All those stories portray this magical-overcoming-adversity-and-solving-world-problems tone to it. Plenty of hype that is directed towards future just graduated kids who'll take the bait and apply for 10k shit money from Paul. Not hating, just stating (facts)

Impressive. Sometimes you have to keep your eyes open so that you don't miss success when you are busy doing other things.

There are many online stories, so I'll give one old school urban legend - P&G soap started to float based on an accident in production. So they marketed Ivory as "So pure it floats." (Sure Snopes discredits the story, but since it goes along with my point...)

Sometimes the pivot happens to you.

Reminds me of this apenwarr post on "A profitable, growing, useful, legal, well-loved... failure": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754531

Bad title. They seem to have found product-market fit, and—not surprisingly—it wasn't where they originally expected it to be. Good for them for embracing it.

Really good read. It's so easy to fall into the trap of making the product you want to make rather than the one your customers want to buy.

When I saw the title I thought that it'll be about Flickr. Do you know other businesses that underwent such transformation?

The Homsar or Disco Stu of business.

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