Ask HN: We built a travel app – a classic tarpit idea. What now?
For context, we're a group of friends who decided to build a travel app after being frustrated with planning our travel across group chats, Google Maps, spreadsheets, and other tools. We've spent a lot of time polishing the app to include modern group chat features, deep AI integration with function calls to manage your trip end to end, and publishing a mobile app on iOS. But we're very new to the startup space and are learning as we go - we made the double whammy mistakes of building something before validating the idea with potential customers, and building in an overly saturated space that will be a constant uphill battle to acquire and maintain users.
We're looking for advice on next steps - potential pivots, growth hacks, anything really. Hoping for brutal honesty!
I left the travel industry in 2011, but if any of my knowledge still applies, and you want to make some money... you need to do things to drive hotel bookings.
You probably need a catalog of hotels and places to visit anyway to help users plan things. But make sure you have a way for your users to book those hotels and you to get a commission. Make sure you're making landing pages for people to find with search engines. You'll probably want/need to pay to get people into those same landing pages, so you'll need to be tracking revenue at a very granular level, so you can bid higher on the pages that make you more money, and less (or not at all) on the pages that don't. And if you're in multiple commission programs (which you should be), you can be sure to highlight the ones that make you more money.
You may want to have something t help your users make airplane and car bookings too, but those margins are slim, so work on hotels first.
[1] https://lifehacker.com/yahoo-trip-planner-100875
Focus on integrating well with existing chat apps for the chat functionality. Make it easy to pull info from your app into a group chat in whatever chat app. Don't make everyone have to join yet another chat system just to plan a group trip.