[profstasiak]

What is your opinion on [0] ?

I disagree with him about " My best guess is that a truly great consumer service needs to be something that is can be used every day. " I use Wanderlog (YC19) almost every trip I do, a lot of my friends after I recommended this tool started using it. Yet it is kinda right - Wanderlog doesn't seem to be making big progress, although pandemic is probably responsible for that

[0] https://blog.garrytan.com/travel-planning-software-the-most-...

[bjpless]

This is a great and valid question along with a helpful citation. Here are some counterpoints:

1) I would argue that that perspective misses a number of travel consumer apps like AirBnB.

2) I've bootstrapped this business and, while I do think that it could eventually morph into a regularly engaging social network or a tool for professional trip leaders (who would invalidate the limited usage point as power users), a healthy lifestyle business outcome would be reasonably ok (if not desirable) by me personally. I don't believe that I could have bootstrapped this company in 2012 (the date of that article) given the startup ecosystem and, frankly, this is a passion project after having previously worked at and founded SaaS fintech companies.

3) I do expect group travel to grow a ton over the next few years if people continue to work remotely. The evidence of mass social alienation is clear and folks have previously unheard of flexibility to travel.

[solumos]

1) AirBNB is an accommodations marketplace, not a travel planning app. He's very specifically talking about travel planning apps. It's pretty difficult to monetize travel planning or travel discovery — you've basically got to be 10x better than Google Docs/Sheets and Instagram (respectively). And that's only considering product functionality. Pricing and monetization is a whole other conversation. It's really hard to build something big when all of the OTAs + AirBNB are already controlling most of the available supply.

2) It most likely won't lead to a successful social network because people mostly think about travel a handful of times per year. That was one of my tough learnings while working on Sherpa[0]. It could be a useful tool though! Maybe there's a solid B2B angle. Bootstrapping is also very smart. We tried to raise VC for Sherpa and ran out of runway.

3) I think you're right. There's probably something interesting there!

[0] - https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/02/sherpa-turns-instagrams-be...

[bberenberg]

To add, this specific area of group travel is getting VC money now. See https://trovatrip.com/

[molsongolden]

I had a similar initial reaction but thought about it more and could see Villagers as something different from a classic "travel planning app" due to the combo of 1) recent remote/hybrid work explosion and 2) public or semi-public trip discovery (maybe my trip isn't publicly searchable but I can ask friends to circulate the link to their friends)