It's a great idea. We will try add them soon.
154 karma · joined October 16, 2013
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Try to ask Siri for that ;).
To help with the discussion, I dont think "politics love people more than in US". Just that people's "lobbies" have more "media power" than in the USA. And its a really bad timing for uber to come to our countries: anything that can sound like more unemployment its going to be rejected by government, even if it's false. Its a false dilemma, but taxi drivers are saying that government is destroying 5K jobs just in Madrid and giving them to the yankees.
ps. I'm a BIG fan of huginn and your work. We studied it and had a very interesting discussion on moving everything to your platform, but we already had a mature version of our backend when we found it and we are not rubyists. I can remember writing on twitter something like "We have hit the open source jackpot". Said that, we will try sooner than later to, at least, connect your agents to our platform.
Talking about MVPs, I hate myself for not having started with something like this. Instead of creating an web form where you can ask the users what they want (and giving the service, if not its not mvp!), we waited until we had an stable good looking ios app (with 35 different types of alerts, dynamic forms etc etc) -4 months of hard work.
FYI, we used surveys (we did ~1000) for validating the idea and getting new alert ideas but that's nothing compared with real users feedback. That's something you can't get until you launch something that looks real (like getnotifiedapp.com does). In two weeks we've learnt more about our app than ever before, including surveys, private testflights and so. Lesson learned (and this is something we cannot say noone told us, its at every modern startup book)
Good luck with this project!
The big problem in travel is competence. It makes user (re) acquisition REALLY expensive and probably, as a startup, you can't afford it (an this mixed with no actual retention is painful). And why is it so expensive: because you cant compete with advertising, SEM or even SEO with big players out there with a LTV that multiplies yours by 10x. And actually, do a better job than you when we are talking about user satisfaction.
Airlines, big online travel agencies are really good at this and pay for a) Long tail SEM, b) content for being top SEO. Remember, Online Travel Agencies are technology companies with big resources. They are extremely good at SEO, at loyalty, at landing page optimization, at design, at customer service... their life is on it.
Think about this scenario:
User searches at google for "traveling to Vienna" (or even "travel planning vienna"). You know two things about that user: 1) He wants to plan his trip to Vienna (75% true) 2) He is going to buy cheap tickets to Vienna (95% true).
Big OTAs or Airlines know this, and what they do? They fake they are travel planners doing better (expensive) SEO than you as they know that user is going to buy the ticket at their site (that's 2$ per visit revenue)... because they do that extremely good. If they fail noone cares: User wont remember and at least they had brand awareness for their plane tickets.
Anyway, i think the problem is much simpler and applies at every industry: if you don't have a great retention (and this can be something not under your control, e.g. because what you are selling is needed twice a year) you have to be really good at user acquisition. And being good at user acquisition at a not-niche sector is extremely hard, no matter how good your product is. Probably you will have to focus first on what's your hack on getting users instead of at having a good product. Sad but true.
I've been reviewing Alexa's top travel sites for years hoping something changes... and its pretty discouraging: only 1 of top 25 sites not a ticket-seller: Tripadvisor (2nd). 4 in top 50, and all of them are super seo sites.
Google has been punishing not content sites for years, even being the best solutions. We've seen a lot of amazing ajax tools for almost every problem we could figure out... but if they were not seo compatible, everyone forgets them. I hope this changes in the future, e.g. mobile apps have another search scenario.
Said that, there is a sentence by Julio Cortazar (as I remember) that applies in this kind of problems and I found really useful: "When someone says that he will go, he's already gone". Go.
I like this approach. Is closer to what web developers are used to: We included analytics on every page, we don't need to create reports until we find a problem or something to optimize... and we still can do forensics.
2 side notes:
– Asked who did this in our app, he told me it was really easy to add mixpanel on "every event". But anyway, he would prefer that it was automatic... and not having to do it again on every view we include.
– As said on my previous comment, for this you need it to be cheap. If not, im creating a problem instead of a solution. At this scenario, mixpanel' people looks less exprensive than heap' sessions.
A question:
Does a "pay for the metrics you use" model makes sense?
Collect everything, what you pay is some sort of multiplier of (metrics used in reports or segments per user). It would be great, at least for this scenario.
I read in the first comment (from mixpanel founder) that the hard part is not collecting data but making them work as formulas.
That makes you able to not storing the data that has not been included on any report or segment for more than a month or something like that if you want to reduce costs.