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A comment on Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money tha... by saberdancer on Thursday December 31, 2020 @09:45AM (#25593074)
Looks quite interesting. I'm curious if market product fit is there, you are trying to sell an app to people who are looking to travel cheaply.

Does your app offer some kind of incentive for use. Perhaps utilize data from other users to suggest how much certain city/trip should cost. If you need data for that, it might be a good idea to offer the app for free/freemium. Perhaps for free you can do planning but with premium you get further insight for average cost of a specific trip or even suggestions for trips of various types/cost.

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Re:Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money tha... by ganashaw on Thursday December 31, 2020 @10:45AM (#25593668)
My grand vision is actually a "trip itinerary search engine" so people can search for "Barcelona for 2 people for $1000 or less" and get all the matching itineraries.

But yes, as you so rightly pointed out, such analytics is only possible with a user base, which I've been struggling to acquire (admittedly, I haven't tried very hard). A free model may be a good way to go to build that user base initially, and may be something I explore, but I didn't want to give something away if people WOULD pay for it.

One thing I've considered, if I do go down this route, is that free users' trips are public (or mostly, I would try to censor dates/residential locations) while premium users can make private trips or something like that.

Overall, I've gotten a lot of feedback on this thread to reconsider the pricing/monetization strategy, so it's definitely something I need to look at.

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