Hacker News Reader

Comment by ld50 | Hacker News Reader

"Hipmunk fills a niche"

what niche? the niche for online ticket purchasers who prefer gantt-style interfaces? the niche describing the set of customers who rely on a single provider (orbitz.com) for their ticket-purchase decisioning data?

"in a highly monetizeable market"

i'd love see your CAC, CR/CRR, AMPU/AMPC, etc breakdown for the online air ticket space.

"Things are looking good for the team at Hipmunk."

when your only competitive advantage is a gantt-style interface, your outlook is not often described as "looking good".

i wouldn't consider a large base of online fanboys to be a significant competitive advantage in an industry where your competitors are 10 years established and have revenues in the billions of dollars.

"it's a great opportunity for Chris"

in the sense that it's probably better than staying at conde? --sure. in the sense that it will likely result in a significant payout down the road? --again, that's debatable.

View on HN

Startups are not exactly the sum of their current business frozen in amber. For example, at the moment they're tied at the hip to Orbitz and get very, very little of the value created by a ticket purchase. I bought a roundtrip to DC with them for ~$300, and they probably saw $3 or so from that. However. If they prove in micro-scale that people buy more tickets through their interface than the interface of competing providers, then the carriers have a huge, huge incentive to deal with them directly and cut Orbitz out of the loop. And then its like "Hey, we're 1% more efficient than the current leader of a multi-billion dollar market which has no switching costs." I wouldn't regret being in that situation, because there is a range of predictable next actions and almost all of them result in good stuff for the founders.

And if they can't sell tickets with all the gnarly fulfillment and credit card processing done by Orbitz, great. Learn the interface paradigm doesn't add value now before you spend several million on building out the company to support it. Their core source of business risk is the hypothesis that demand is not extrinsic: that you can increase the number of tickets sold by making the process suck less. (The working hypothesis in the travel industry is that the economy offers exactly X trips per year, X is both unknowable and cannot be altered, and marketing/pricing merely distribute X among the various providers. This is what the experts think. If the experts are wrong, Hipmunk walks away with money hats. If the experts are right, they're not necessarily sunk.)

i wouldn't consider a large base of online fanboys to be a significant competitive advantag

I'd consider that virtually a license to print money in a high-value vertical with an SEO that knows what they're doing.

Is it harder for Hipmunk to build an infrastructure comparable to Orbtiz, or for Orbitz to put together a UI comparable to Hipmunk?

(That said, I could definitely imagine an Orbitz/etc TechCrunch-reading management buying Hipmunk instead of assigning some devs to build it inhouse.)

Wow. That is the most mean-spirited thing I've read about a new startup in a long time. I also bet it turns out spectacularly wrong and deserves to be preserved in a glass case somewhere.

Come to think of it, someone should collect the worst comments like this for posterity. It would help immunize new founders to see how the predictive value of these things is zero.

> to see how the predictive value of these things is zero

Just because the response was blunt doesn't mean it wasn't well-founded. I would actually -love- to hear the dirty internals of Hipmunk, the best you'll get out of Techcrunch is a sugar-coated hype story detailing how nice their house is.

This should be a madlib. I'll go first.

When your only competitive advantage is a [feature that lets you poke your friends], your outlook is not often described as "looking good".

Fewer features, anarchist phd dropouts, a home page with less stuff

>i wouldn't consider a large base of online fanboys to be a significant competitive advantage in an industry where your competitors are 10 years established and have revenues in the billions of dollars.

And who would have thought launching a search engine in 1998 would have paid off?

The entrenched travel sites are established, but painful. If Hipmunk can add a few more features and further refine their site, they can easily claim a chunk of market share.

I'm not sure what their funding model is, but they might try looking at advertising a lot more than they did with Reddit. Look what it did for Priceline, travelocity, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com