Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

indiehackers.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 244 posts

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#101

Post by dabernathy89 »

jmarbach wrote: post #72

Disclosure: I built a competing tool for finding cheap flights, https://concorde.io . I think the secret of Scott's success is his incredible writing ability. Finding the cheap flights is the easy part. Communicating with users in a way that consistently wins over their hearts and minds takes a high level of consideration and creativity. This writing ability combined with his co-founder's understanding and applicatio…

FYI: I am trying to update my user settings (for my airport preferences) but it won't let me without re-entering my CC information.

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#103

Post by jmarbach »

sfbay wrote: post #82
jmarbach wrote: post #72

Disclosure: I built a competing tool for finding cheap flights, https://concorde.io . I think the secret of Scott's success is his incredible writing ability. Finding the cheap flights is the easy part. Communicating with users in a way that consistently wins over their hearts and minds takes a high level of consideration and creativity. This writing ability combined with his co-founder's understanding and applicatio…

Nice website. Fix this issue: 1) When I search with a date, it loses the depart and return dates every time. Save the dates and remember them. 2) After I select a depart date calender as Month September, it should open September when I select Return calendar.

Thank you for the feedback! Agreed that the depart and return date inputs should be improved as you mention. I am always seeking to eliminate needless repetitive actions! I'll do my best to get this resolved quickly.

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#104

Post by SSilver2k2 »

bkidwell wrote: post #94
jwong_ wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you've looked at what gets sent out, but the e-mails sent for the Giveaways are extremely spammy. I get that you probably added it somewhere in the giveaway text, but from a post somewhere, it was indicated the giveaways were more to garner attention, not as a profit-making venture. It turned me off completely when I started getting those. It gave me a negative impression on both Scott's Cheap Flights…

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 :-)

I have gotten messages from all of these, and they are complete spam. I'm glad I know it's your fault.

What's done is done, I've unsubscribed.

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#105

Post by jessriedel »

chrisballinger wrote: post #64

Something I've noticed that's lacking from most aggregators like Kayak and SkyScanner (my current fave), is the ability to increase the price of the ultra-budget carriers by adding their carry-on baggage fees and whatnot. I don't care about checked bag fees, but some of the carry-on fees are ridiculous ($60 per overhead item?). These budget carriers are cheating the system by looking like the cheapest option, when in…

I have written to Kayak suggesting this in the past. Without such a feature, the hidden charges and nickle-and-diming will just get worse.

The best explanation I heard (from elsewhere) was that if Kayak automatically included any fees, then some users might see a lower price on another site and mistakenly conclude the Kayak didn't actually have the lowest prices. But this seems obviously solvable by making it a non-default option and displaying the price as "$X ($Y fare + $Z fees)".

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#106

Post by ChuckMcM »

bkidwell wrote: post #86
jwong_ wrote: post #78

One thing I'd like to vent about is that Scott seems to be making a lot of money selling e-mail addresses. I signed up for a couple different contests using unique e-mail addresses generated specifically for the contest (Yes, they were separate e-mails for separate contests; No, I did not double-dip my entrees). I was then signed up for 2-3 e-mail lists for 3rd party companies over the course of a couple weeks. These…

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…

And these two comments (the parent and grandparent) capture the tension between money and principles. I don't know anything about the insides of your business but we dealt with this crap all the time at Blekko.

Realistically, how many of your customers are going to make a custom email for your giveaway promotions? Its going to be small, and they are 100% going to get spammed and abused by that part of the Internet industry that slams unwanted apps in your face or hijacks your search page for sideloads an advertising rootkit on to your phone. Because that is what they do, they get away with it and make a lot of money at it, and yes they offer you a small piece of the action and all you have to do is give them validated email addresses.

The local Taqueria had a jar that said "Put in your business card for a chance for free lunch, awarded monthly!" and the jar had dozens of business cards in it. I asked about it and the restaurant had nothing to do with it, except that the restaurant was paid by a local recruiter $100 a month to have that jar there.

So one of the Internet scumbags makes a deal with a web site, "Here is a contest you could run which is tangentially related to your web content, all you have to do is run the contest and we'll pay you $x." Free money right? No, it just makes you one of the Internet scumbags too, maybe you didn't know they were going to click jack Grandma's PC but at some level everyone who gets into these deals know there must be some catch otherwise they wouldn't be giving you all this money right?

If you are in the airport and someone says "Oh, are you on the flight to Chicago? My sister-in-law just left for there and forgot this bag, if you'll check it through to Chicago when you get there she will pay you for your trouble. How about $500 ?"

You have to ask; Why is it worth $500 for me to pretend this is my luggage when it would cost less than half that to go to FedEx and just ship it? Why is this person paying me to run a free lunch contest for them? Why is this internet company paying me to run a giveaway contest for them?

At Blekko we tried several times to find the people who weren't scumbags and were actually trying to provide a real service or value to our customers. They may be out there but if they are, they are outnumbered by scumbags at least 1000:1, maybe more.

The only winning strategy was to just not deal with them at all.

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#107

Post by [deleted] »

bkidwell wrote: post #94
jwong_ wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you've looked at what gets sent out, but the e-mails sent for the Giveaways are extremely spammy. I get that you probably added it somewhere in the giveaway text, but from a post somewhere, it was indicated the giveaways were more to garner attention, not as a profit-making venture. It turned me off completely when I started getting those. It gave me a negative impression on both Scott's Cheap Flights…

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 :-)

[deleted]

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#108

Post by taphangum »

Huhty wrote: post #102

What fascinates me with this story is how low tech everything was. A simple landing page, email list/newsletter, and "value" in the form of travel deals. Anyone can do it, and the barrier of entry is minimal.

Tech provides leverage horizontally, not vertically.

As programmers, we often fool ourselves into believing the opposite.

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#109

Post by gleglegle »

jontas wrote: post #100
jmarbach wrote: post #72

Disclosure: I built a competing tool for finding cheap flights, https://concorde.io . I think the secret of Scott's success is his incredible writing ability. Finding the cheap flights is the easy part. Communicating with users in a way that consistently wins over their hearts and minds takes a high level of consideration and creativity. This writing ability combined with his co-founder's understanding and applicatio…

Tiny suggestion: I was looking at flights and it was not immediately clear to me that Santa Cruz referred to Bolivia and not California. It almost made me disregard it and not click. May want to put the country name on the homepage as well.

Santa Cruz, Bolivia (pop. 1,640,615) is much larger than Santa Cruz, CA (pop. 64,465).

Re: Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business

#110

Post by jmarbach »

mattfrommars wrote: post #90
jmarbach wrote: post #72

Disclosure: I built a competing tool for finding cheap flights, https://concorde.io . I think the secret of Scott's success is his incredible writing ability. Finding the cheap flights is the easy part. Communicating with users in a way that consistently wins over their hearts and minds takes a high level of consideration and creativity. This writing ability combined with his co-founder's understanding and applicatio…

Love the simplistic design of the website to give the information right away! Can you where are you sourcing the data from? I've playing with Flask and Scrapy yesterday and love to build something like it. What I have in mind, [Complete disclosure - I'm a total novice right now] Scrapy to get the data and Flask to integrate it on the web with a Boostrap front end.

Thank you! The deals that I post and distribute are sourced from a variety of sources including manual searching with tools like Google Flights / QPX (like Scott's team), programmatic searching (expensive as others have mentioned in the comments here), forums or blogs, and of course Concorde's "Discover" tool. The Discover tool makes use of a cache of flight search data that is collected from Global Distribution Systems (GDS) such as Sabre and others. Further reading on GDS's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system
Post reply on HN