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[Progress] Starting another SaaS (travel industry this time)

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

devbe83

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Hey everyone!

After selling off my previous SaaS, I thought I'd keep things relaxed for a year or so, to be able to think about things, get the creative juices flowing, and so on. "Keep things relaxed" lasted for 6 months, time to try something new!

While building out that previous SaaS (a developer product) and talking with other developers, I discovered a niche. By accident, mostly, but I was surprised at the time there was no existing solution for what I was searching. I posted about it on social media, hoping it would spark someone else to start building. Three years after providing that spark, it looks like nothing happened. I'm in need of the same service again, and there's nothing out there.

That could mean two things! Jump into that niche, or steer clear because there is absolutely no demand for it.

Unlike my previous venture (which turned out great), this time I decided to do some research first. Is there demand? Can I tick the CENTS bullets all the way?

The service I'm looking for is in the travel industry, related to flight booking. Yes, vague, I know, but I'm in the process of thinking what the exact pitch is going to be so bear with me in this thread. There are travel agencies that can do what I'm after, but they charge a lot of money and handle things manually. I want automated, fast, and less expensive.

The fact that there are travel agencies providing this, proves there is at least some market. And they ask good money, so I can definitely ask for money too.

As an added test, I spoke to some people in my network who I think could need such service as well, and asked them if that was indeed the case and if they would pay for it. Big yes from all 5 people I talked with. Not statistically significant, but again some proof there is a Need.

I've had this idea for three years now, there seems to be a need, so let's see hat we can come up with. The thread is prefixed with [Execution], by all means I want to go towards a launch at some point. But first, let's see if the other CENTS bases can be covered.

Edit July 19, 2019:
it's alive!
 
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devbe83

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So we covered Need. Will it scale? Definitely. I've identified a market, and also found a way to market this service to them once it's built. Will this service need my Time? Yes. To get it built. But once running, Time will not be tied to $$$, so even while I'm not working on this service income will be generated.

NTS will work, I'm confident in that. But what about CE?

Turns out Control and Entry are more interesting. Let's lift a tip of the veil. A big aspect of this service will be flight (and later on, train) bookings. Over the past weeks I've been researching what is possible there, and I'll provide a bit of an overview here in case anyone ever needs something similar. I've looked on the forum here but there is not a lot so here's a 101 into online travel.

To be able to sell airline tickets and/or rail online, you will need:
  1. Access to a (searchable) inventory. Find flight from A to B, with carrier Z.
  2. Access to a pricing API - what does that specific fare cost?
  3. Access to a booking API - can I secure that fare until my customer pays me?
  4. Access to a ticketing API - thank you for your business, here's a ticket.
There are some ways of getting access to any or all 4. I'll give you a list, even!

For full control, but higher cost of entry you will need to go to a GDS - Global Distribution Service. There's Amadeus in Europe, Sabre in the US, Travelport, and some more. They all offer all 4 of the above, and give full control over what you can do in terms of searching, booking and ticketing. And that control will not be subject to a lot of changes, as pretty much every travel agent has to go through them in some way. They have their revenue, and more is better.

Great! Except... These GDS are quite expensive. There are sales people involved before even being able to start a proof of concept. And they also make Entry a bit harder, as for some operations you will need to register as an official travel agent and a couple of other things. This definitely ticks Control and Entry - most control you will have unless you start your own airline, and barrier of entry is high enough to discourage many.

Thing is, I want to start building, see if the idea is feasible, ... I do want to invest in the entry, but not the numbers and effort they require. Yet, at least. If the idea grows this is probably the better way to go.

The alternative to using a GDS is using an OTA - Online Travel Agency. These parties are travel agents themselves, integrate with one or several GDS, and resell their access via various means. Since I want to build something that requires full control of the flow, I'll need access to an API out there that gives me all 4 of the points mentioned before.

Some parties I have found through various search queries:
  • AirHob - they have a developer API for all of the above. Except, after two weeks and two reminders their support hasn't responded to some basic questions I had yet. If I want to provide value to my customers, I'll need a vendor that does the same.
  • Kiwi.com - they have an API and can cover all 4 points. But after searching for booking experiences with them, I found a lot of negative comments. Mileage could vary, but let's not spend time integrating to discovered I can't provide value because they don't.
  • Travelopro - not even sure what they provide, and haven't heard back from them yet either.
  • Travelomatic - same story.
Anyone see the theme here? By making Entry easier, Control seems to shift down - if I can't get a response, how can I keep at least some control?

Spoiler alert: I've found another one that is very responsive, but will talk about them in a future post.

And a tip for people looking for ideas needing execution: create a developer-friendly way to get all these 4 points, have some support folks, and outcompete all of the above OTA's that provide an API.

So we've had OTA's. Is there anything else out there? Yes there is! Affiliate programs with an API. These are what they are: affiliate programs that provide a search, and give an affiliate link to go book at an airliner/Expedia/... It only ticks box one (search), but for a minimum viable product (MVP) I could live with that. Parties I've found:
  • Travelpayouts - they have an API that uses cached pricing and affiliate links, and a real-time API. I'd need the real-time API but the use case does not fit their requirements. So for my scenario, doesn't even work for an MVP...
  • SkyScanner - except they only share revenue once you hit 1.3k in revenue per month. How about no...
So what to do? Go with full control and a higher cost of entry? Or a lower cost of entry, less control, but a faster time to market. Questions, questions... But it's getting late here so signing off.
 
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devbe83

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In the previous post I mentioned GDS and OTA, and the conection between control and cost of entry. Ideally, I'd like to go with a GDS as that provides full control. Entry is higher though, and looking at integrating with them also looks like a longer time-to-market.

Some more searching landed me with an OTA that has the exact mission I described

create a developer-friendly way to get all these 4 points, have some support folks, and outcompete all of the above OTA's that provide an API.

The OTA is AllMyles.com, and they seem to do exactly what I need to build my service. Last week, I've contacted them, and contrary to the other OTA's I've contacted, AllMyles responded within 30 seconds (!) and I ended up Skyping with their founder, who is doing this as his own way to the Fastlane (while working a job at one of the big GDS). We chatted about the service I want to build, and he even gave some thoughts on how to implement certain parts. Very happy about this! I'll start a trial with them soon to check if their travel API does as promised. I have high hopes.

Before starting to trial, I do want to get developing the surrounding service (flight booking is just one part), so let's make some progress there first. I now do have all building blocks I will be needing, nice!

Being a developer myself, there is no doubt I can do this. However one of the takeaways from my previous SaaS was to learn to delegate sooner (to be able to focus more on sales and business development), so I ended up looking for people on UpWork. Chatted with one, and figured out right now the idea is too "green" to have someone on board already. Seems like too much overhead to get an MVP created this way. So I'll start working on it myself after all.

Hoping to make some progress this week.
 
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devbe83

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Been a while since the last update, so here goes!

Service/application
Adding several features I had thought of, but are now requested by first users. Feels good to validate those ideas, but must be careful not to fall into the "build trap". We'll see, for now all requests seem useful and I can see them being used by all customers over time, so that's good.

Website
After feedback from @Erico123 and @dawp, made a few changes to the main (marketing) website, making it less dense and fine-tuning the main message. Probably will need more iterations but much happier with it now than with the first version. Thanks, both!

Business
Still going slow, intentionally, to gather customer feedback one by one and be able to be there for them. That said, I've started e-mailing some folks I know would be interested, of which one showed genuine interest.

As a test, I also did 10 cold e-mails this week (following up next), as I want to see whether that could be a channel that works. Will see and finetune where needed.

Stupidity (and undoing it)
On the website, there's a chat button to get in touch quickly. Unfortunately, I had notifications disabled on that and missed a 100 travelers conference reaching out there. D'oh!

One month after that request, which is when I saw it, I did reply to them apologizing for the late reaction, and offering them a demo over Skype. Which we did this week, and they seemed happy with functionality (plus some feedback of "nice to haves"). Hoping to close this one soon.

In summary, is this fastlane yet? No. But it's starting to prove its value, and that's step one.
 

devbe83

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Whoa lots of replies! A bunch of quotes and responses coming up...

Is your site prepared to handle that kind of scale once you start getting a few thousand users in ?

That should be fine. Most of the real work like search/ticketing is done using a messaging system which is easy enough to scale horizontally. Of course, that's what I say now, although proof is in the pudding. I guess we'll see, past adventure has thought me a lot in terms of scaling things on the technical side.

What I am more afraid of in terms of scaling is the support requests this might bring, the fact that my vendor might not be able to scale along, etc., etc. The Control aspect of CENTS :)

Also have you thought about combining lodging with your service? maybe with an established API ?

Yup, but not doing it yet. My vendor has loding (hotels) and rental cars in their API as well, but for now this doesn't seem needed for this niche.

I'm investing a lot of time and money into adding additional features for my next version, but I'm also cautious in implementing some of these ideas because I know to focus on the core USP and to see how much of the target market can validate it through $$$ - is this what you're referring to when you mention "build trap"?

Exactly that :) Don't build it if nobody is using it or asking for it! Of course, do build the things that are your core USP.

Since it appears you're primarily targeting conferences, is there any reason the emphasis is only on speakers? Other than speakers, conference organizers might be responsible for people in other crucial roles. Moderators, judges, performers etc.

You might cast a potentially wider net with a conference approach, rather than focusing only on speakers.

Absolutely agree with that, this is very niche on purpose. There are a lot of ancillary traveler types, potentially. Speaking with a number of bigger conferences, those usually have an event management firm taking care of travel and all that. Might need to go after those as well, and see whether they can offer SpeakerTravel to their customers.

The app itself is not as niche as the marketing front, so could be used in many other scenarios where "a third party is paying for your travel". The potential 10k travelers I mentioned are not in my current niche, so would be good to see how much is needed to fit the current app's flow onto that new market.

How do you plan to monetize your website?

Right now there's a fee per traveler, or a fee per event. More info on the website under pricing.

Also thinking of a community version for marketing purposes, where events with only 1-2 travelers would essentially be able to use the app for free (but of course still pay for the actual travel fare).
 
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devbe83

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Status update time!

In the past couple of weeks, I've been chatting with a company that is doing something very different, but essentially could use the workflow of having a "third party payment for travel". It could have been a good fit, but I decided this might not be the best thing to pursue. From a business point of view, short term, this could have been interesting to ramp up sales, but long term I'd be creating a job - a job of being "the person doing the travel stuff that we integrate with". This company decided to put the idea in the fridge for a while (restructuring), so that kind of solved itself. We still are in touch and keeping each other up to date (both startups), but no active partnership.

On to the next thing: I'm onboarding two big conferences, or rather two big organizations each running 4 big conferences a year! They are a bit different from earlier users, in the sense that they need some additional automation so they can run travel booking almost hands-off. Great! Because now I have two parties that had the same question, which means it's time to also build it.

Regarding pricing, I've been making some updates...

Right now there's a fee per traveler, or a fee per event. More info on the website under pricing.

The fee is now per traveller, and the more of those you require, the cheaper the "unit price" becomes.

Also thinking of a community version for marketing purposes, where events with only 1-2 travelers would essentially be able to use the app for free (but of course still pay for the actual travel fare).

That idea got canned! The app provides value, and even for one or two travellers the fee is not extraordinary high. Also wanted to avoid 10-speaker events creating 5x 2-speaker events to circumvent the pricing model.

Regarding ads, @francevalue, I wanted to do those pretty soon, but seeing a bunch of events being cancelled now because of the well-known pandemic, decided against those for now until the panic settles a bit and organizers start looking at the future again. In the meanwhile, working my network.
 
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Ocean Man

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Devbe, this sounds interesting. I’d love to hear more about your idea, maybe we can bounce back and forth. As I’ve also had thoughts of doing things in the travel field specifically with airline tickets. Definitely see things that can improve. Mainly customer service.
 
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devbe83

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A couple of weeks have passed, and I am glad that even being busy with other things, I made progress on executing this idea!

On the technical side

I was able to build much of the application that will support the business. User management, sending out invites, accepting invites, managing travel, searching flights (with fake data), and more. Really happy with what I have right now! Not the cleanest code, but if there's one thing that matters more than clean code it's making progress and getting that MVP closer!

There are a couple of things still missing that should be easy to add later on, the big one is coming now: integrating with a travel provider to use actual search data, as well as making actual bookings. As described earlier, I will go with the folks from AllMyles as they seem the most reliable in this world of chaos :smile2:

To be continued! Interesting few weeks of integration coming up...

On the business side

Building something in the SaaS world from scratch means building out technical things, but there is also the business side of things. I pitched the idea with two more people in my target audience, and they were sold! Unfortunately only by figure of speech - I really want to get that MVP soon so I can validate interest with € instead of lip service.

Other business-side hurdles are in legal and applicable laws. I've been researching selling flights in Belgium, and it looks like all should be good to go without any barriers of entry! Flanders, the region in which I live, explicitly states free entry in the travel market. At the country level (Belgium) there are a few things to take into account:
  • When selling combined travel packages (e.g. flight + hotel, or flight + car, etc.), end customers must receive a template containing applicable rules around reimbursements, cancellations, etc.
  • When selling single items, no special rules apply. I've asked my lawyer to double-check, but it looks like for now I'll have a nice shortcut as the MVP will only provide flights.
  • There *is* one smaller hurdle: ticket fees. It is frowned upon to add ticket fees on flights as a reseller. Now, that's not a big issue as the business model I have in mind will place the revenue stream elsewhere (still sort of per-ticket, but not as part of the actual ticket sale).

And finally, thanks @warrantor for pinging me occasionally on what the status/progress was and nudging me into action by talking about progress on your own SaaS idea.

Now off to a well-deserved beer as the proverbial pat on the back, and then in the next weeks let's get that MVP closer!
 

devbe83

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Woohoo! Progress!

The application is 95% finished. There are a few rough edges in the UI I still want to fix, and e-mails need a nice template as well. Other than that, I can seach flights, view pricing, make a payment and book a ticket. At least, against the development service AllMyles has.

There are some edge cases to cover, too, but I am very much leaning towards ignoring those for now and showing a "contact support" page instead. It might actually lead to customer feedback when someone runs into those :)

The trial I have with AllMyles will run until July 7th, but I plan on going to the paid version sooner if I can. This does mean I will have to cover the entry cost to go live on their API, but that's fine - an entry cost helps with cEnts, right?!?

Since I have built (part of) their API in .NET now, which should be reusable by others as well, I will offer them the sorce code to that (not really my business value) and see if they are open to a discount on the entry fee for me. We'll see - they are very responsive and helped a lot over the past week, so this may just work.

On the business side, branding for the application is in, I have a domain name that I will use to build a landing page in the coming weeks to start working on organic leads.

I also have talked to a couple of folks that are my target audience, they are still happy, and I gave them a branded PDF with some screenshots, pricing, etc. Will check back for feedback from them in a few days.

More travel coming up for myself, ironically, but the good news is that I will meet more of my target audience there as well. Will pitch the app (and even show a demo if they want, since the app is 95% done!).

Time for a beer and a weekend that is not spent behind the computer... Cheers, folks!
 

devbe83

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@404profound Right now this will be invoice based (prepayment), with low # of customers the payment gateway is not yet super important. Stripe was indeed on my radar as they also allow SEPA Direct Debit (in Europe) and the same concepts on cards (rest of the world) which is a perfect match :) Thanks for the tip!
 
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devbe83

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A very quick status update:
  • The web app has gone live, certification has been paid for and was approved, and now all I have to do is wait until someone at the GDS flips the switch to be able to book actual tickets. (In other words: everything works and is active, apart from the actual booking)
  • Have been adding a live chat and support e-mail address into the application to be able to help a hand if the need arises.

On the to-do list:
  • Once live, get that first customer to try things and gather feedback.
  • Work on a landing page to pitch the web app to future prospects.
  • Pitch the web app to future prospects.
  • In other words: marketing and sales!
 

devbe83

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Let's start with the non-fully-related :)

Did you sell the SAAS company or the app itself? How was that process of selling? What valuation multipler did you get? did you use a business broker?

The company. Being bootstrapped and thus not having a team to go along with the sale, we landed at a multiplier of 2.5. That process was pretty smooth actually. The purchasers reached out to us and we worked with our and their legal + our accountancy firm to work on all documents required.

So for your designer job post, how did that work out?

Good! The site promises 3 designers, in the end I got 45 designs for ~100 EUR. Enough choice to pick one (from 3 that I thought were good and clever) to my liking and have its designer fine-tune a couple of things. Very pleased with the result, and having the choice to visually see alternatives was great!

Also did you have a demo ready for customers to view? If so did you use Youtube? or something else?

I wanted to show "the real thing", or something as real as possible. Visually see what it looks like. So started off building everything and once I had a couple of screens, showed those and asked for feedback. A few weeks ago I had them try on the staging application and got good feedback out of that: a couple of things they really wanted, and made a lot of sense for others as well.

This was a good process not only for customers, but also for myself. Building it required a deeper understanding of the API's I would have to call and the data they need/return, which in turn also influenced a little bit of the flow and design.

Where are you hosting the web app ? VPS ?

Microsoft Azure, on their App Services service, in a Docker container. App Services because it's their only model where you can pick a dedicated hosting plan (as in, you get a full "VPS" in terms of CPU and memory), and host multiple containers on that plan.

Do we get a link to see how it looks ;)

Not yet :) Want to get this first customer use it, process feedback and get that landing page up. Once that's done, will share it here.
 
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devbe83

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A week has passed, time for a status update!

Let's start with the one thing that was still pending... the GDS has fixed a blocking issue on their end, which means I can now (finally) book flight tickets! That also means go-live for the application, which happened yesterday.

While waiting for that GDS issue, I have been working on the landing page. A first version of that is online now as well and can be found at SpeakerTravel - any feedback would be very welcome! Although right now I'm not expecting much traffic there yet (going for a bit of a dark launch for now)

The TL;DR pitch: when organizing a conference and inviting speakers from abroad and covering their travel, manually handling booking preferences and invoices is time-consuming. SpeakerTravel makes this process a breeze.

My first customer is... me! For an event I (and a couple of others) are organizing, I've invited a few travellers. And of course, the first feature request already came in which is to allow booking flights for the invited traveller as well as their partner. Sometimes conference travel is a bit of vacation, so that makes sense as a feature... Let's get that implemented :)

My next customer is on vacation right now, I do plan on keeping them very warm and get them into the app as well. Fingers crossed!
 

devbe83

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Devbe, this sounds interesting. I’d love to hear more about your idea, maybe we can bounce back and forth. As I’ve also had thoughts of doing things in the travel field specifically with airline tickets. Definitely see things that can improve. Mainly customer service.

Thanks @Ocean Man ! And I totally agree the travel field has many opportunities for making things better. I'm a frequent traveller myself and it's ridiculous some times what hoops to jump through. Usually goes well, but not always.

Got pinged by someone else here on the forum, to chat about the flight tickets side. He works at a travel agency so that should bring some additional thoughts and insights.

I'm happy to report I've made some progress on the app side! A web app is in the works, I can register/login/change password etc., and I've built 4 screens that are the start of the process I want to automate. Not yet sharing the idea (still too rough). Hope to share it soon once I have visualized the process a bit better. But ironically, my next week is full of travel with not much chance for making progress on this one... To be continued!
 
D

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Don't spend too much time analyzing. It sounds like you have enough evidence that you need to start designing and coding.
 

Ocean Man

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Thanks @Ocean Man ! And I totally agree the travel field has many opportunities for making things better. I'm a frequent traveller myself and it's ridiculous some times what hoops to jump through. Usually goes well, but not always.

Got pinged by someone else here on the forum, to chat about the flight tickets side. He works at a travel agency so that should bring some additional thoughts and insights.

I'm happy to report I've made some progress on the app side! A web app is in the works, I can register/login/change password etc., and I've built 4 screens that are the start of the process I want to automate. Not yet sharing the idea (still too rough). Hope to share it soon once I have visualized the process a bit better. But ironically, my next week is full of travel with not much chance for making progress on this one... To be continued!

Will be following, definitely interested!
 

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I ams building a SaaS as well (telecoms) and have the same issues with potential number suppliers as you have with the OTAs.

Good luck and best wishes with your venture. I am definitely following this one.
 

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A couple of weeks have passed, and I am glad that even being busy with other things, I made progress on executing this idea!

On the technical side

I was able to build much of the application that will support the business. User management, sending out invites, accepting invites, managing travel, searching flights (with fake data), and more. Really happy with what I have right now! Not the cleanest code, but if there's one thing that matters more than clean code it's making progress and getting that MVP closer!

There are a couple of things still missing that should be easy to add later on, the big one is coming now: integrating with a travel provider to use actual search data, as well as making actual bookings. As described earlier, I will go with the folks from AllMyles as they seem the most reliable in this world of chaos :smile2:

To be continued! Interesting few weeks of integration coming up...

As a fellow developer, I'm curious, what stack are you using?
 

devbe83

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As a fellow developer, I'm curious, what stack are you using?

Going with what I know best: .NET (ASP.NET MVC and Razor all the way, with some jQuery sprinkled in). Does this hurt me? Yes!

I'd love to go with Vue.js on the front-end, add some HTTP API in the back-end and be all shiny and fancy. But in the end, I want to make progress in launchign something for use and worry about the tech side later :)
 
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D

Deleted50669

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Woohoo! Progress!

The application is 95% finished. There are a few rough edges in the UI I still want to fix, and e-mails need a nice template as well. Other than that, I can seach flights, view pricing, make a payment and book a ticket. At least, against the development service AllMyles has.

There are some edge cases to cover, too, but I am very much leaning towards ignoring those for now and showing a "contact support" page instead. It might actually lead to customer feedback when someone runs into those :)

The trial I have with AllMyles will run until July 7th, but I plan on going to the paid version sooner if I can. This does mean I will have to cover the entry cost to go live on their API, but that's fine - an entry cost helps with cEnts, right?!?

Since I have built (part of) their API in .NET now, which should be reusable by others as well, I will offer them the sorce code to that (not really my business value) and see if they are open to a discount on the entry fee for me. We'll see - they are very responsive and helped a lot over the past week, so this may just work.

On the business side, branding for the application is in, I have a domain name that I will use to build a landing page in the coming weeks to start working on organic leads.

I also have talked to a couple of folks that are my target audience, they are still happy, and I gave them a branded PDF with some screenshots, pricing, etc. Will check back for feedback from them in a few days.

More travel coming up for myself, ironically, but the good news is that I will meet more of my target audience there as well. Will pitch the app (and even show a demo if they want, since the app is 95% done!).

Time for a beer and a weekend that is not spent behind the computer... Cheers, folks!
Enjoy the beer, you earned it!
 
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devbe83

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Some progress has been made! The app is now live (on a test URL, with a staging API that does not officially book tickets yet).

Also asked one of my prospects to test a bit and got some great feedback on how search works ("I can see booking classes - I can normally NEVER see those!"). He also found soem thigns that he would like to see changed, but all are minor and I should be able to do that soon. He's on board to try it out when certification is done, and very much on the way to having a first paying customer!

Speaking of certification: I also applied for that. Entry cost is being paid, but once done I should be able to issue real airline tickets.
 
D

Deleted50669

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The cert to issue airline tickets is another barrier to entry for your business, so that is great. Will your platform manage payments? If so, Stripe could be a good option (their fees aren't too bad for the value they provide at scale).
 
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Deleted50669

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A very quick status update:
  • The web app has gone live, certification has been paid for and was approved, and now all I have to do is wait until someone at the GDS flips the switch to be able to book actual tickets. (In other words: everything works and is active, apart from the actual booking)
  • Have been adding a live chat and support e-mail address into the application to be able to help a hand if the need arises.

On the to-do list:
  • Once live, get that first customer to try things and gather feedback.
  • Work on a landing page to pitch the web app to future prospects.
  • Pitch the web app to future prospects.
  • In other words: marketing and sales!
That's sick, looking forward to seeing it take off.
 
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devbe83

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Still awaiting the person at the GDS to flip the switch to be able to book actual tickets. The intermediary seemed annoyed as hell that this took so long, so that is good.

But in the meanwhile, made things a bit better by integrating SEPA Direct Debit (via www.gocardless.com) so I can immediately request a payment for every booked flight. Not that I don't trust my first potential customer to pay me afterwards, but this is a good step forward again!

(And GoCardless was the first API that I was able to integrate in less than two hours, pretty slick! Next one will be Stripe to support US-based customers as well.)
 

dawp

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My two cents: too much text.
Mobile navigation elements are not centered correctly.
Besides that it looks really nice.
You planning to run some cpc adds on facebook or google soon?
 
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devbe83

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It's been a while, time for an overdue status update.

In August, I've had several passengers booked by my first customer (myself), and now working with the second customer (an actual customer) who has already booked 10% of their number of passengers/tickets. Number three is also lined up and should start in the coming 2-3 weeks.

I'm not too actively chasing new leads yet. The app was build as an MVP. An MVP is not Minimum, but Minimum Viable. So both myself, as well as customer one and two have something that works and does most of what they want. However, both are giving me great feedback, feedback that validates the actual needs. Some of that feedback I had already in my backlog, and a few other things are trickling in from their usage. Executing on those remarks while they are working with their passengers, so they also see progress is being made and their feedback is being implemented.

After these two customers complete their entire journey through the app, I should be break-even (barring my hourly development costs). All of the Entry costs will be zeroed out at that point. Pretty nice :)

On a side note, I also ran into the daily developer reminder of the Commandment of Control. As mentioned in an earlier post, I'm working on the .NET Core stack, and more specifically, the bleeding 3.0-preview8 version for which the proper release is planned end of September. Great! As right now there is a blocking bug that I can't work around and prevents from implementing one specific ask. Not a blocker, but if I would have had my own programming language and platform this would not be a blocker :) (joking - I would have hundreds of other problems, but found it interesting to see that "giving up control", even at that technical level has an impact)
 

Erico123

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Make your website more personal and humanize it. I know it's just a MVP and this business idea has some huge growing potential but the way it is now is in my view not practical for trying to sell a service. Remove some of that plain text and maybe minimize the information the customer reads when he first loads in. By the way, if you want to make of use a certain element, then make it worthy for the customer to look at it. Right now, all elements are like kind of equal and do not draw the attention of the customer which therefore results the customer skipping maybe crucial information at the bottom of the page. Just remember, 80/20 applies to webdesign as much as it does to business and any other areas.
Other than that, keep on the grind.
 
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