bkidwell

Yeah I hear you. I really appreciate the feedback as well.

We only try to partner with high quality companies. For example this Tokyo one were running right now is with journy, ProductHunt, theSkimm, The Wirecutter, and Conde Nast Traveler. All legitimate companies. It's unfortunate that their emails are seen as spam because that's not good for anyone.

We'll keep this in mind moving forward. Thank you again :-)

Hey, I'm just going to post the same response I used in the IndieHackers comment section for someone with a similar concern. Here's what I said:

"Our subscribers are too important to us to ever sell their information to someone else. We never have and never will sell users information like that. Our only source of income is subscriptions and occasional advertisements in the free emails. Ruining our reputation to make a few extra bucks would be an extremely stupid decision on our end. With that said, we do run promotions with partners where we give away awesome vacation packages (Mexico and Tokyo recently). If anyone signs up for one of these promotions they are agreeing to the terms and conditions, which clearly state that by signing up for the giveaway the email address will be distributed to all of the partners involved in the giveaway (typically 4-5 other companies)."

And their response:

"Thanks for the reply! I looked through my emails and found that the emails started right after I entered a giveaway from you. So that explains it! You're right, it does say for the giveaway offer that you're signing up for emails. Sorry that I jumped to conclusions. It's just that I get a lot of spam and it's very annoying. Also, your partner emails provided no value to me at all."

--

With that said, it looks like we could do a better job making it even more explicit (which we try to do in the emails announcing the giveaway). We'll work on this on our end and never intended to mislead anyone.

We have plenty of copycats out there (one of the downsides of us trying to share our learnings online haha). I'd just look at when the domains were purchased if you want to know who was first ;) Also, we send deals from almost every continent (launching Africa by the end of the year).

Cool I like the tooltip idea. We're working on a lot of changes right now so I'll definitely keep this in mind.

I'd actually rather put "Past Roundtrip Deal" above the deal info just because of how big the word "Roundtrip" is. We have to keep design in mind... and if we just put RT that would likely lead to confusion as well.

Wow, thanks for the feedback! Almost every single deal we send out is roundtrip. This is actually why we put "normal roundtrip price" instead of just "normal price" to help clarify this.

Maybe instead we should do "Roundtrip NYC to Paris: $260" and then put "Normal Price: $900" to help clear this up.

Thoughts?

You're right. We do some A/B testing when we're running promotions (test headlines, CTAs, etc.) but that's about it. There is a lot that goes into correctly running split tests on the website and interpreting those results. We decided that once something is working good enough we'd focus on other areas of the business. However, now that the team is larger and we have resources to dedicate to testing and optimizing we will likely start doing this by the end of the year.

Like you said, moving buttons and changing colors is really just a waste of time. You have to spend the time to do the analytics research, get customer feedback, etc. to first understand the problem so you can come up with a solution. Changing the color of a button doesn't solve a problem. Rather than wasting resources on doing conversion optimization the wrong way, we've decided to hold off until we can do it the right way.

Thanks Joel!

That's a great question. At a certain point... yes. But I think that number is much higher than a few hundred thousand users. If you think about departure cities X destination cities X available dates and times X number of seats, the number is huge. I'm not saying it won't happen, but I think we have a long ways to go before we reach that level.