So, Scott originally accumulated all those miles working for ThinkProgress? How does that work? You buy the flights and expense them back to the company, pocketing the miles?
Yes, that is how it works at most companies AFAIK.
Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
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Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#32So, Scott originally accumulated all those miles working for ThinkProgress? How does that work? You buy the flights and expense them back to the company, pocketing the miles?
Yes. This happens in pretty much every company, even if the company has a corporate card. Employees rather buy the tickets themselves and expense the costs.
Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#33So, Scott originally accumulated all those miles working for ThinkProgress? How does that work? You buy the flights and expense them back to the company, pocketing the miles?
Yes, that is how it works at most companies AFAIK.
And the IRS is totally OK with it, since 2002: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/a-02-18.pdf
Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#34So, Scott originally accumulated all those miles working for ThinkProgress? How does that work? You buy the flights and expense them back to the company, pocketing the miles?
Yes. This happens in pretty much every company, even if the company has a corporate card. Employees rather buy the tickets themselves and expense the costs.
Well, if you have a corporate American Express card, you can pay $75/yr and you accumulate all the points on your corporate card for yourself.
Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#35>We actually don't do a ton of A/B testing or worry much about open and click rates, and here's why: Our revenue model is subscription based. We don't take any commissions or have any ads in the premium emails. Our only incentive is to keep premium subscribers happy. I find this a surprising statement -- aren't the emails the primary channel for trying to convince a free user to upgrade to paid? Why not try A/B testi…
He did say they "don't do a ton," so they are definitely doing some, maybe that's where?
That said, I do appreciate the sentiment here. This is a different context entirely, but in my ecomm past a/b testing was often employed by those seeking the politically safest growth path. I considered it proactive CYA where Product Managers would prefer premature optimization over having an opinion on what's best for the user.
I witnessed what I considered an unhealthy amount of a/b testing resources spent on micro adjustments eg moving a buy button a few pixels or changing the color slightly. There was very little calculated risk taking, which can be enabled with A/B testing employed differently. There's absolutely a place for those kinds of optimizations but I think they come much later in product maturity than when many organizations actually begin using them.
Then there's an entire other discussion about understanding the math behind building a relevant test and interpreting the results.
Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#36It's interesting that they employ a dozen flight searchers who manually look all day. Are there any flight prices APIs that can be scraped, looking for significant outliers?
Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#37Ouch, their site triggers one of my pet peeves about travel sites, listing prices without clarity whether the deal is one-way or round trip.
NYC to Paris: $260
Normal Roundtrip Price: $900
As feedback to Scott and Brian, this actually makes me hesitate to sign up for premium, because I don't know what level of discount we're talking about here. A 2x difference (one way versus RT) is significant.
Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#38>We actually don't do a ton of A/B testing or worry much about open and click rates, and here's why: Our revenue model is subscription based. We don't take any commissions or have any ads in the premium emails. Our only incentive is to keep premium subscribers happy. I find this a surprising statement -- aren't the emails the primary channel for trying to convince a free user to upgrade to paid? Why not try A/B testi…
He did say they "don't do a ton," so they are definitely doing some, maybe that's where? That said, I do appreciate the sentiment here. This is a different context entirely, but in my ecomm past a/b testing was often employed by those seeking the politically safest growth path. I considered it proactive CYA where Product Managers would prefer premature optimization over having an opinion on what's best for the user.…
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.
Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#39I hate to be the one to ask, but how much moat does this actually have? Couldn't Kayak literally just add a subscribe or alert me later input and have their massive infrastructure automate this very thing?
Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
#40It's interesting that they employ a dozen flight searchers who manually look all day. Are there any flight prices APIs that can be scraped, looking for significant outliers?
Just saw thus addressed in the comments:
> Great question. We get this one a lot and have been approached by quite a few developers who say they could easily build us something like this.
Is it possible? Sure.
Would it be better? I doubt it.
Say we use Google's flight API. The cost per query is 3.5 cents. Departure airports X destination airports X available dates X 3.5 cents = a ridiculous amount of money.
Or we build a scraper. It would be cheaper than the API, but we'd still need the human element to make sure it's actually a good deal. We take into account number of stops, airlines, etc.
I see potential for a computer/human combo in the future, but right now our flight searchers are doing great and we don't feel that automating the process would make the business significantly better.