[deleted]
Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack
111–120 of 128 posts
Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack
#112> We found that no one actually wants to use these tools— they just have to, and that the only people who were satisfied with the state of things were folks who had assistants they could offload the work onto. I suspect this is the case with a lot of business / enterprise software. Congrats on the launch. I think this space (software assisted services that rely on Slack / SMS / email) is a promising one. Best of luck…
I wonder why enterprise tools end up this way, is it because the buyer (CFO/procurement) is different from the end user (employees)?
I was in b2b software sales until recently. I've been on the other side of the table when the buyer will be an end user, or when they have end users they're placing trust in and actually listening to.
Imo the issue is more just that ease of use is a hard sell. Buyers, including end users, want features. Lots of them. They want to be able to do everything they could ever potentially think to do within your software, doesn't matter if some of those tasks are once a month/year items for which perfectly good solutions already exist and for which there's no real gain from having it within this solution. It's what they ask about, what they want to talk about, what they test for, what I get feedback on from them when I win/lose the sale.
They might want ease of use in 6 months when they're actually using the thing and not give two hoots about most of the things they were certain were necessary earlier, but that's irrelevant. They didn't want it when it mattered. Now they're locked in. In terms of contract but also in terms of what their processes are designed for, what their staff are trained to use, what their other tools integrate with; and there's no guarantee or even reason to believe that an alternative wont be just as bad.
So there's tons of pressure on b2b software providers to do a lot of things but very little to do any of it well.
Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack
#113This reminds me of Magic ( https://magic.gd ) or Fin (now defunct, https://fin.com - a closer match, with a similar if broader mission). Hopefully the narrower scope will allow you to escape the issues that Fin ran into, trying to bolster their team. :) Magic has fixed pricing for some tasks, including travel booking I believe - so hopefully Carry is (or becomes) either less expensive or higher quality.
Must have missed Fin shutting down. Any info on why they closed up?
Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack
#114Hi HN! We've been impressed with the response here. Y'all must love travel. If you use Slack and want to get started using Carry for your team, we've created a temporary link while we're on the front page to go ahead and install Carry. Here's the flow: - Go to https://carry.travel/hnpromo - Select your team's workspace in the top right - For "Post to", select "Slackbot" or anything (this step is annoying, sorry-- we'…
Hi ! Congrats on the launch ! If anyone finds it helpful, I've created a guide with screenshots for how to signup for carry: https://flowshare.io/flow/how-to-signup-for-carry-for-hacker...
Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack
#115This reminds me of Magic ( https://magic.gd ) or Fin (now defunct, https://fin.com - a closer match, with a similar if broader mission). Hopefully the narrower scope will allow you to escape the issues that Fin ran into, trying to bolster their team. :) Magic has fixed pricing for some tasks, including travel booking I believe - so hopefully Carry is (or becomes) either less expensive or higher quality.
Must have missed Fin shutting down. Any info on why they closed up?
This obliquely-named blog post has the context:
Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack
#116Here's a killer feature everyone wants: I want to put a date range and get the cheapest plane tickets. Big range, I want to find the cheapest time of the year to fly and plan my vacation. Nobody lets you do this.
https://www.kiwi.com/us/
Let’s you set travel ranges, multiple destination options, geographic areas and more. Shows you the cheapest options within the range of parameters you set. My absolute favorite vacation planner.
Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack
#117Can you have a non-Slack version? Just a page where you put your log in information and it asks the same thing the slack bot does? It would take like 15m to build this
We have customers using SMS and email as well. We’ll highlight those words on the site Maybe we’ll add a web app chat sometime, too. But would SMS satisfy the use case you’re thinking about? Also, do you not use Slack or do you use it but not want to use it for travel? If latter, why? FWIW, maintaining support for more platforms is easy when it’s just text, but Slack is very powerful / can have rich UIs (eg a book bu…
SMS is great. Please convince my $MegaCorp to use this instead of the god-awful 90s attempt at flights.google.com they're using right now... god speed!
Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack
#118Congratulation!
Now we know why Slack is highly valuated. You can even build a startup on top of it. :)
Anyway, what technology do you use for NLP? Spicy? Do you use Deep Learning? What about non-English languages?
Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack
#119Interesting... How are you performing the bookings? Are you registered as a travel agent with GDS access? Or are you going through an other agency?
We're partnered with a travel agency with GDS access. Additionally, we use various other OTAs that give us the full range of inventory for hotels and flights. In general, travel agents that only use GDS don't have access to budget airlines such as Easyjet or alternative accommodations such as Airbnb or Sonder.
Ok makes sense. So you’re acting as a TMC but without the TA part? I guess the difficulty here is incident support: Say I’ve missed a flight and I need to be rebooked, hotel and taxi notified etc... With a classic TMC I call them on the 24/7 hotline and some agent will do it live for me. In your case the support line would be you right? Because your travel agency might not have access to the airbnb reservations etc. But then isn’t it tricky to intermediate the rebooking discussions between the customer and the agency?
Extra question: how do you manage the non-gds content? Do you ask your travel agency to add remarks to the PNR, or have you built your own database to track these “PNR+extra” bookings?
Sorry, lots of questions but it’s a really interesting idea!
Re: Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder why enterprise tools end up this way, is it because the buyer (CFO/procurement) is different from the end user (employees)?
I was in b2b software sales until recently. I've been on the other side of the table when the buyer will be an end user, or when they have end users they're placing trust in and actually listening to. Imo the issue is more just that ease of use is a hard sell. Buyers, including end users, want features. Lots of them. They want to be able to do everything they could ever potentially think to do within your software, d…
This is exactly it. You don’t lose an RFP if your product sucks. You lose an RFP if you say that it doesn’t match one of the 700 outrageous requirements