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Ask HN: Review my startup – itripd.com

37 points by teddiekgb ↗ HN
Hi HN, http://itripd.com is a travel startup where you can "share your travel adventures and discover others". Looking for any constructive (or destructive) criticism people may have to offer. Initial target audience is travel bloggers. itripd is intended to be used by travel bloggers in a similar way they already use facebook, pinterest and twitter (to show case their trips) and will act as another channel of traffic to their own web site.

43 comments

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LBarret
I thought of something similar, but focused on a team composed of a senior who cannot move and plays the role of HQ (search & intel), and a adult who take photos/videos/etc following the guidance of the HQ. It would provide an interesting exchange : the senior feels like s/he is travelling, the adult gets backup and better level of info.
rcarrigan87
Did you actually build this? Please post link if so!
lukasm
Very cool. You may want to simplify on-boarding users e.g. bio can be added later. I'd like it to tell me a story in a chronological order with some rough costs (animation would be great of travel to next places)
teddiekgb
Thanks lukasm, I will be looking at improving the on-boarding of users very soon. I agree that an empty profile isn't the most enticing sight for a new user.
personlurking
Cool. If ten people write about relaxing in the Caribbean, will the site list all 10 posts or somehow favor the best piece?

____

This kind of thing would also work on an expat site where people could give their impressions of living in X city. Maybe with categorization of person's general income range, lifestyle and type of experience being shared (so others of similar ilk could look at what they might encounter in that city).

dennybritz
I actually like this idea a lot. Most tourists are visiting the same spots, and most travel sites give me the same stuff. It would be interesting to follow the daily lives of expats or locals, segmented by what type of work they are doing, and what kind of lifestyle they have.

These are two pretty different target audiences though. The formers one caters towards tourists who are about to visit the city for vacation while the latter caters towards people who are considering moving to that city.

personlurking
Agreed, and it was something that bothered me when writing my comment because the OP obviously is only focused on one of those audiences.

I have about 20 cities under my belt (half, foreign) and could do the low-income version of all of them :D But this would be a good thing to add to the one or two expat-related sites concerning living costs that have popped up on HN in recent weeks.

sdernley
This is a great idea, i'd more interested reading about someones experience with a similar budget to me that something that might have more (or less) limits that i'll have. In a similar way, mentioning if the trip is an active trip, or a relaxed one might help (if you don't already do that).
teddiekgb
Hi personlurking, well it's not really a huge problem right now because the site has hardly any content :) But, to answer your question the trips are generally ordered by popularity (views and likes). Thanks for the feedback
chrisseaton
I typed 'London' in the search box, selected the obvious result it gave me, but then it took me to a page that says "No trips found featuring , ".

Also, do you specifically disable selecting and copying text? I can't seem to do it in Safari. I found out when I tried to copy that error message, so the direct impact on you is people are dissuaded from sending you error messages!

teddiekgb
thanks chrisseaton for pointing out that bug i will add it straight to the list... should be an easy one to fix
Mister_Snuggles
Overall, this is really nice!

I found a bug: I started at http://itripd.com/trip/4, scrolled down to the Desert Safari, clicked it, then clicked a picture. When you close out of the picture (clicking the X) the site gets into a weird non-functional state. Clicking a second picture removes the list of pictures, but doesn't bring up a new one. I'm on Safari 7.0.5, but this happens in Chrome as well.

The weird thing about this is that other trips don't seem to have that problem. I did notice that other trips load the comments box beside the picture, but this particular one doesn't. Very strange!

teddiekgb
thanks Mister_Snuggles for pointing that one out. I have never seen what you described and will be sure to try to reproduce it asap.
yitchelle
Great idea! Some feedback from me.

1) When I type in the city name in the search box, I can hit return to make selection, I have to click on the city in the drop down menu.

2) missing search box on the front page.

3)I type in France, and it says nothing matched my search. I would have expected that Paris would be shown.

4) I like that you are using OpenStreetMap instead of Google's or Microsoft's map products.

teddiekgb
hi yitchelle, the search feature needs to be improved. One big problem with search eature is that it can only be so useful to he user if there is not much content to display in the results. That is the reason i left if off the homepage to begin with. Once we have more content im sure a nice big search bar will find its way on to the homepage :)
trbvm
Doesn't work with java-script and cookies disabled. Just a big picture and then blank space.
andrewcross
If I'm understanding correctly, you are hoping this will become a site where people come for travel inspiration (e.g. I'm thinking of a trip to Thailand, so I come to your site, see the trips the travel bloggers have put up and go through them). If that's correct, you're going to have a tremendously hard time getting this off the ground.

Why don't you just focus on the travel bloggers side to begin with? Specifically, I think there's a need for a Soundcloud-esque embeddable widget that people can put directly in their blogs (naturally linking back to you). THAT provides real value IMO. Most blogs are highly entertaining, but they rarely have mapped content - you can provide that.

From someone that's founded a travel marketplace & failed, avoid network effects in the beginning if at all possible. It's a whole other level of pain, that in your case at least, I don't think is needed.

I'm actually going backpacking for 3 months starting next week, so if you come out with a widget, I'm more than happy to use the beta versions and give you feedback.

doragcoder
> ... avoid network effects in the beginning if at all possible. It's a whole other level of pain...

Can you explain what you mean by that? I thought network effects were good. No?

prayerslayer
> I thought network effects were good. No?

They are. But you shouldn't rely on them in the beginning because they won't be there.

andrewcross
Network effects are great...when you have them. But in the beginning you won't. That's why if you can provide value to an individual user without requiring network effects, it will make your life a lot easier.

In this case, if you get bloggers using your product, logging their trips, etc, you'll slowly build up your content. Once it's comprehensive enough for travellers to get value from it, you'll be able to build network effects from a much stronger position.

sdernley
Looks really good. I might be missing it, but i think it would be a good idea to have a filter (or search) for region on the main page. I might not be interested in travel in general, but interesting in visiting a particular region so only want to see stories from that area. Just an idea, but i think it will help you lose less people if they land on the site looking for something more specific.

Hope it works out for you!

psychboo
A purely cosmetic criticism - the logo looks almost exactly the same as the tumblr logo.
notjustanymike
Down to the period at the end. I think that may be more than a coincidence.
jnardiello
As a random user, i really like both idea and execution. The website looks good, the ux is simple and straight-forward. Everything is exactly as i expected it, which is a good thing.
waterside81
A monetization strategy for you: Try to associate any mentions of hotels, day trips, activities etc. with a link to viator/hotels.com etc. and get the referral fee.

If I was doing an idea like this, I think I would have gone mobile first (perhaps you're thinking to go that way anyway?) That way you can tap into people's geo location right away, easily associate photos & videos with the location, people can log their thoughts/feelings with a quick note, and perhaps purposely limit it to 140 to make it tweetable.

giarc
Looks great. I typically user TripAdvisor for my travel research but this looks great. TA is a bit cluttered and sometimes hard to find exactly what you are looking for. I like how the person's trip is grouped together.

Because of this grouping, I would suggest 'tags' for the trips. For example, someone could tag a Toronto trip with "sports" or "hockey". Their trip might include a trip to the hockey hall of fame, a Leafs game, a trip to the old Maple Leaf Gardens (now a grocery store). These tags could be pre-determined by yourself, or user submitted. This way, if I am going to Paris for example, and I see a trip that is tagged "Music", and I'm not into a music trip, then I know I should look at someone else's trip for Paris. Thinking about this though, perhaps each destination within a trip/country could be tagged since trips often have multiple events with multiple 'tags'. Sorry, I'm just rambling a bit. I think you get the idea though.

I'll be submitting a few reviews though. Good work!

teddiekgb
Hi giarc, i always ad the thought to add in 'activities' or 'tags' later on. But, the more i think about it the more important it becomes to implement as soon as possible. The big question i need to answer is if they are predefined or user submitted (as you mentioned in your post). If it just activities then pre-defined would be ok (there are only so many activities you can do).But, if I want a user to be able to tag just about anything (for example a user went to a basketball game and wants to tag a place with 'miamivsdallas') then it must be user defined. Do you have any more thoughts on this?
notjustanymike
There's no search on the homepage. Coming to your site, I decided to find out about Prague. I had to scroll down to the tiny and dim 'more trips' before I landed on a page with search.

Then I found out the search is, bluntly put, absolute crap. I typed in 'Italy': nothing. I typed in 'My Weekend in Italy', the name of the first item: nothing. I typed in 'Argentina' and got 'National Congress of Argentina'.

If you're trying to build a site about going cool places, I'd recommend making it possible for me to FIND those cool places.

archagon
As a traveller and occasional blogger, I like the design a lot. It feels functional and not as blatantly "social" as other sites in this vein. For my trips, I already use Google Maps to create maps with all the places I've been or want to visit in a new city[1]. I'd be very interested in using your site to create personalized maps in this vein: descriptions, photos, and comments would make my maps a lot more interesting. However, in order to do this, I'd need to be able to use different types of pins categorize my places, since having several dozen photo pins in one place would be too confusing. It would also be very useful to have a mobile app, as I use these maps on the go.

[1]: https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=zU8tVyO_sZdE.kj9h...

teddiekgb
hi archagon, thanks for the feedback. it's nice to hear from people who would consider using itripd. Yes, at the moment we only support one pin style. But, the current pin system does cluster very well so you may find that the existing clustering system works well for your trips with many pins in close proximity to each other. I will experiment with some other pin designs in the meantime. There is no mobile app at the moment but the site functions well in the browser on tablets and phones. Thanks for the link to your trip :)
corywright
I'd like to see is for the search drop-down to list locations that aren't already in the trip database. This way it prevents people from misspelling locations when they are the first person to add it to the site.

Edit to add: Also, please allow setting a username so the profile URL is meaningful (and pretty).

Edit again to remove unnecessary feature request.

nsetu
The site seems functional and simple - which is good I suppose.

I like to check places to visit,shop,eat,drink based on cities.

Just few suggestions though, 1) It needs proper search feature. 2) Its going to be loaded with lots of blogs probably on same city? So, how would you handle that? For Eg: If I search for say 'Dubai' then if I got more than one results how can I filter this out. 3) It would be nice if I could navigate based on categories on map. Like 'eat','drink','shop' etc

Otherwise, well done! Looks good to me.. :)

nirajd
I see quite a few images from shutterstock. How do you expect the beauty of this site and the images posted by users to scale?
teddiekgb
A good point nirajd. We hope that travel bloggers who are fighting to generate more views for their trips will generally choose to upload interesting and attractive photos in order to stand out from their competitors. But of course being a site with 100% user generated content (travel bloggers or non travel bloggers) we expect to see a diverse range of quality.
SteSteSte
1) The Url isn't exactly memorable.

2) I am able to traverse your directories eg http://itripd.com/js/

I don't know about apache so was unable to find a web config kinda file

3) I tried some sql injection and got this response "The URI you submitted has disallowed characters."

I assume you are doing this manually rather than using sql parameters?

4) Inline CSS...yuck

5) Links like this http://itripd.com/trip/4 arn't very friendly.

draker
I have a recommendation though don't want to share publicly as it's competitively sensitive. Contact me (email in profile) when you have a chance.

Edit: John, your server is rejecting my reply to your email. Check your settings or contact using a different email.

ahulak
Very cool site, I can see this being pretty darn interesting. Things I would like to see (but I am only one person!)

1. Mobile interface (I hate to be that guy, but this would be awesome as a native app for those travelers) 2. Widgetized! Most travel bloggers want this on their own site. 3. Ability to map out a journey (as opposed to placing destinations on a map). I think a lot of travelers really take pride in the route they take and how they get from place to place (eg a motorcycle ride down the coast of Vietnam, or a boat ride across the mediterranean, etc)