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by bjpless 1325 days ago
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.
2 comments
solumos 1325 days ago
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...

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bberenberg 1325 days ago
To add, this specific area of group travel is getting VC money now. See https://trovatrip.com/
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