Ask HN: I'm building something for the airline industry..

It's really a business development question I have. I'm currently building what I assume is highly attractive to the airlines and consequently their customers, but my feature list is running low because I can't justify anything beyond the minimal stuff.

1) If you're in my position (2 person team), how would you get in touch with biz dev guys at airliners? I'm assuming they're the right people to try to contact for partnership deals.

2) There is an opportunity to take what I've done + the idea and apply to a local incubator. It's a summer program, and the deadline is approaching FAST. Biggest downside is that they're asking for 10% with $5k + $5k per founder. It won't get me in the same network caliber of ycombinator, but it's probably better than doing it on my own.

Any advice? Thanks

You have to be certain that it is highly attractive...enough for them to pay you money for it. You're also going to face a huge hurdle with bureaucracy and proprietary technology (if it's an app).

I worked for a hotel marketing company a few years back, and we had a proprietary booking engine that connected in house reservation systems with web-based ones. There was a team that went around just building code on top of each hotel chain's proprietary software that would tie into our system.

I had a similar idea for a comparison shopping app back in 1999 where I would compare prices between different brick-and-mortar stores and allow people to shop online for a list of items, and show them on a map the fewest stores with all of the items at the cheapest price, or the cheapest price, regardless of the number of stores, or the shortest drive with the lowest price. That never got off the ground because there is no easy way to get all of the stores to give you an up to date XML feed of their current inventory and prices. Not in 1999 anyway...maybe it could be done now, but I'm not so sure. My idea was that I would start with a website in 1999, and maybe in 10 years we would have mobile technology that could take advantage of the backend data. I was right about the technology part.

I'm not sure what your idea involves, but I would try contacting a few airlines to see if it really does solve a problem, and if so, how many more does it create?

As far as the app allure. I've seen it work BIG TIME for a different industry and the timing is right to sell them on the model. Both airline and consumer will benefit greatly.

I guess my question really is, How do I come up with leverage before I approach these guys.