Again, I gotta nominate "Tinder, but for pickup basketball" as the most common bad startup (or at least app) idea. I get excited college students hitting me up with this nearly every semester, like clockwork.
Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
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Re: Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
#32I love that this was first posted in 2012 and it is still true today! The other common bad startup idea: parking apps! When I organized and facilitated Startup Weekends, we had one in just about every batch.
Re: Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
#33Again, I gotta nominate "Tinder, but for pickup basketball" as the most common bad startup (or at least app) idea. I get excited college students hitting me up with this nearly every semester, like clockwork.
One made it to Shark Tank (no deal): https://sharktanktales.com/hoopmaps-shark-tank-update/
Re: Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
#34anything new on this since 2012 you think?
Here's a bunch of previous discussion from 7 years ago:
Re: Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
#35Personally, I think part of it is that it hasnt been done well yet. Everyone focuses on one problem instead of looking at the entire experience holistically. A feature that rarely gets put at the top of the list is true collaboration. Traveling with just a spouse or with a group, multiple participants have different wants, needs, preferences, interests. Maybe one person is in charge of travel logistics, one in charge…
Don't want to be offensive but your insight is not really insightful.
Why?
Because it goes in totally wrong direction.
Most people don't want to work on stuff or plan the trip - they want to pick up the phone, tell what they want and have it organized. Organizing or even putting your wishes into some forms is work and that is not what people want ... they want to have VACATIONS and not fill in some application forms.
I work in insurance area - my business people would like to make forms so business owners can fill in what they have and what they need in some magic form and that software does the rest. Removing middle people who pick up the phones and moving work of filling in details to the customer.
I see it is not working because business owner wants to call someone, tell him "I have a bakery, I want insurance" and be done with it. Because he is busy making bread, he does not give a damn about your risk compliance process.
Last point is - people also don't want to pay the real price for what it takes to have custom vacations organized - that most people pay for all inclusive in some resort go to swimming pool, have Swedish table and they are happy with it, because they don't have to think about anything and they have all organized.
"All inclusive" is shitty vacation by my standard and I like custom trips but I go into so custom stuff that you don't have database for that because no one is going into those places because of what I wrote earlier.
There is no business in travel planning because it is people who are into custom stuff they want to do themselves (and don't pay) niche or get "all inclusive" and don't care about anything whales. Maybe there are some people somewhere in between but I don't think you are getting money out of them.
Re: Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
#36Again, I gotta nominate "Tinder, but for pickup basketball" as the most common bad startup (or at least app) idea. I get excited college students hitting me up with this nearly every semester, like clockwork.
Just use normal Tinder, and ask every match to a date playing basketball! The problem solves itself.
Re: Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
#37youli.io is doing it, steadily gaining traction. Disclaimer: I built their mobile app.
Re: Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
#38Personally, I think part of it is that it hasnt been done well yet. Everyone focuses on one problem instead of looking at the entire experience holistically. A feature that rarely gets put at the top of the list is true collaboration. Traveling with just a spouse or with a group, multiple participants have different wants, needs, preferences, interests. Maybe one person is in charge of travel logistics, one in charge…
I built exactly what you describe at Flights With Friends. But the thing I learned is that group trips are not a democracy. Trips without a dictator who makes the decisions don't actually happen.
Building tools for the dictator is hard because getting the other group members who are not the dictator to actually use any tool is too much work. You are always dependent on the least reliable member of the group.
This is the exact reason that travel cost splitting tools don't work and the dictator just ends up paying for everything and getting the group members to pay them back. If they used a bill splitting tool the flights and hotels would sell out before the slowest member of the group put in their credit card.
Re: Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
#39Personally, I think part of it is that it hasnt been done well yet. Everyone focuses on one problem instead of looking at the entire experience holistically. A feature that rarely gets put at the top of the list is true collaboration. Traveling with just a spouse or with a group, multiple participants have different wants, needs, preferences, interests. Maybe one person is in charge of travel logistics, one in charge…
>Personally, I think part of it is that it hasnt been done well yet. Everyone focuses on one problem instead of looking at the entire experience holistically.
That's actually the exact opposite of the conclusion I came to. I think the do-it-all travel planner apps have never worked for me because there's some aspect of planning I want to do differently or some case they didn't think of, so I end up feeling like the entire product doesn't work for me.
The apps I've repeatedly used for travel are smaller or more general than just travel - I've used Splitwise a number of times on group trips (or at times even when a trip isn't involved) to equitably split costs. It doesn't do anything else, but it does its thing well. And I've certainly made use of a lot of shared Google Docs to collaborate on itineraries or packing lists, etc. I don't feel like I need a travel-specific chore coordinator app when I can just have a shared spreadsheet that lists which couple is making dinner which night at the ski house. There are a few web-based road trip planners I've used that seem to do a nicer job than just Google Maps for multi-day road trips with many stops, but of course not all trips fall into that category.
So yeah, I think a la carte solutions for different aspects of travel planning work ok for me - find a niche and do that one thing really well.
Re: Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
#40I think in some ways this is also a question of specialized vs universal tools. If I plan a vacation with friends I believe I could do it 90% of the way just as well with a plain old shared word document/todo list.