Thank you, that’s really generous of you. It’s a dead simple stack — which is helpful as a solo founder — of rails as an API and react. I make liberal use of other saasy services.
It’s more complex than Facebook events in that there are fintech (payment) mechanisms built in. I’d describe it as Kickstarter meets FB events but with a focus on travel UX requirements
I wonder if Facebook never integrated payments because of the inevitability of scammers setting up fake events to extract down-payments, Fyre Festival style.
Out of curiosity, how does Villagers prevent Fyre Festival-like events?
> Yes, I'm really focused on the commitment mechanism
I think that's smart. Honestly, the UI is nice and all, but I don't think that's the killer feature. The great thing here is that folks don't want to be an asshole to friends/family/coworkers. They don't want to nag about getting commitments or on-time payments. They don't want to be a jerk about not giving money back if someone bails the night before a trip, or whatever. But Villagers can be the asshole (in a good way!) and enforce the agreed-upon terms so the trip planner doesn't have to.
On a related note, I'm willing to personally act as a travel agent for a remote co-working trip among coworkers as a non-scaleable way to grow the platform initially and get user feedback. If you're interested in exploring in a fun 4-10 person trip with colleagues, email me at ben@villagersapp.com.
I completely understand this objection. Ultimately, this was a tough trade off that I made for reasons that I can elaborate on at a different point.
In most cases, the goal is to have an organizer create a quick video describing the trip to communicate enough info for you to then declare your preferences. Here is an example:
I'll just reiterate what I said below which is that, while I think you point of view has a lot of merit, there are compelling "Why Now" counterpoints that I think you're undervaluing. Only time will tell though!
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.
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!
