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Scott's Cheap Flights: Growing a small side project into a booming business
- thebiglebrewski 9y agoThis is amazing but is it the kind of business that can last for more than a few hundred thousand users? At a certain point people get none of the free deals, because too many are trying to book at once, right?
- bkidwell 9y agoThat's a great question. At a certain point... yes. But I think that number is much higher than a few hundred thousand users. If you think about departure cities X destination cities X available dates and times X number of seats, the number is huge. I'm not saying it won't happen, but I think we have a long ways to go before we reach that level.
- juskrey 9y agoWhile flight industry is booming, almost nothing matters - just keep telling people they can fly cheap. Dozens of aggregators are already doing this.
- austenallred 9y agoEven if it caps out right where it is... they're retired after not too long
- DerfNet 9y agoYeah, if they're pulling $5/mo from each premium subscriber, that's... well, some pretty easy math. They could put a cap on the userbase if they wanted and still be pulling millions per month just off subscriptions, not even accounting for ad revenue.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Toast_ 9y agoPretty crazy that they're pulling that much revenue without even using affiliate links.
- beejiu 9y agoOn the other hand, does it matter how long the business lasts? It seemingly has minimal costs and is making bank.
- joelrunyon 9y agoGood to see Brian & Scott on here. Crazy explosive growth over the past 18-24 months! Great evolution of an MVP into a legitimate, mid-size business without taking tons of funding to do it.
- bkidwell 9y agoThanks Joel!
- bhyam 9y agoReally cool story.
- SadWebDeveloper 9y agoJust wondering if the guys can automate the scraping part, seems unlikely this is usually information that needs to be handpicked or "moderated" by one or more humans.
- gruturo 9y agoSpeculation: it's possible that the source sites are actively hostile to scraping and intentionally mess with the layout regularly, or may even have ruled out any kind of automation in their ToS - so if you don't want to get sued or blacklisted, you can do no kind of (detectable) scraping.
- sleepychu 9y agoMaybe you're in a better position to negotiate this if you're them though? Skyscanner scrape to keep their partner's honest (which has always sounded pretty hostile to me but I guess they're approaching a pretty user hostile marketplace) and with their market share they're able to force their partners to comply with reasonable demands.
- SadWebDeveloper 9y agoThat's my main issue with this type of business... can't it be automated? probably a huge NO without legal implications therefore the "human" expenses are high and if we start to think "globally" like the Silicon Valley startups type guys always do, the next logical step is to make a mutual benefit business partnerships with the Airlines. This will end in a war like Airbnb vs Travel Agencies vs Hotel Chains vs Everyone else, were the best price in town will be to go directly to the source rather than to 3rd parties.
- teej 9y agoI tried to build a flight search site a few years back and many sites have measures in place to actively mitigate scraping. It quickly became obvious that I was going to spend more effort getting data than working on the product, so I scrapped the idea. Like you said, scraping is against ToS so as soon as you get caught, you're cut off until you shell out $$$$ to buy a feed. I suspect the reason they've succeeded here is that they've stuck with a human-based approach.
- Gys 9y agoReminds me of: www.holidaypirates.com With special websites for most bigger European countries. Its more or less doing the same, with lots of affiliations, an app, Whatapp group, etc.
- thebiglebrewski 9y agoWow these deals look too good to be true! But I guess I'm in the US lol
- bmsleight_ 9y agoFurther inspection, looks like terrible prices, the advertised rates are based upon such things as 7 people sharing.
- bmsleight_ 9y agoFurther inspection, looks like terrible prices, the advertised rates are based upon such things as 7 people sharing.
- thesimon 9y agoOr fly4free or secretflying or .. 99% of the time it's just affiliate links slapped on some deals found on FlyerTalk
- kitcar 9y agoInteresting that they have been able to raise prices over time - a fixed number of cheap seats available at any moment means the more users on the email list, the less likely an individual user will be able to extract value from the list - hence list growth actually reduces the value it delivers. I guess fear of missing out is a strong sales tool!
- benjaminbeck 9y agoAmazing how much they did without too much technology or upstart cost!
- jpster 9y ago>We actually don't do a ton of A/B testing or worry much about open and click rates, and here's why: Our revenue model is subscription based. We don't take any commissions or have any ads in the premium emails. Our only incentive is to keep premium subscribers happy. I find this a surprising statement -- aren't the emails the primary channel for trying to convince a free user to upgrade to paid? Why not try A/B testing to try and boost that percentage from the ~10% to something higher?
- napworth 9y agoIn most cases, A/B testing will actually do negative damage than if you didn't test it at all.
- jdpedrie 9y ago[citation needed]
- eddigo 9y agoAnd I would bet in a large subset of those cases it's because the person implementing those tests and the person interpreting the results aren't the same. And that neither understands basic statistical hypothesis testing.
- jpster 9y agoDepends on if the tester actually knows what they're doing. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/your-ab-tests-are-illusory/ https://blog.kissmetrics.com/your-ab-tests-are-illusory/
- ssharp 9y agoIn most cases, flying a plane yourself will result in more negative damage than having a trained pilot fly you.
- ssharp 9y agoInterested in further thought here.
- csallen 9y agoScott also came onto the Indie Hackers podcast this week to talk a little more about his business. For example, about why they don't do any paid advertising to acquire customers: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/020-scott-keyes-of-scotts-cheap-flights https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/020-scott-keyes-of-scot...
- notadoc 9y agoGreat read. The indiehackers site is full of interesting interviews and stories, well worth all of them as there is always something to learn.
- triangleman 9y agoSo, Scott originally accumulated all those miles working for ThinkProgress? How does that work? You buy the flights and expense them back to the company, pocketing the miles?
- sv123 9y agoYes, that is how it works at most companies AFAIK.
- greglindahl 9y agoAnd the IRS is totally OK with it, since 2002: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/a-02-18.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/a-02-18.pdf
- Fezzik 9y agoMost companies I have worked for/heard about have the option of 1) using a company card with the company keeping the perks, 2) using your own card and getting reimbursed or, less often, 3) using a company card that is in our name, paid by the company, with all perks going to you. I've seen 3 most often with Diner's Club cards that cover only meals and 2 most often with travel, if you opt for it. I have seen a surprising number of people who do not want to deal with another bill though, and opt for 1, leaving all the perks with the company. I never understood that, but I enjoy any perks I can get.
- inerte 9y agoYes. This happens in pretty much every company, even if the company has a corporate card. Employees rather buy the tickets themselves and expense the costs.
- exelius 9y agoWell, if you have a corporate American Express card, you can pay $75/yr and you accumulate all the points on your corporate card for yourself.
- mysterypie 9y ago
- pgodzin 9y agoIt's interesting that they employ a dozen flight searchers who manually look all day. Are there any flight prices APIs that can be scraped, looking for significant outliers?
- pgodzin 9y agoJust saw thus addressed in the comments: > Great question. We get this one a lot and have been approached by quite a few developers who say they could easily build us something like this. Is it possible? Sure. Would it be better? I doubt it. Say we use Google's flight API. The cost per query is 3.5 cents. Departure airports X destination airports X available dates X 3.5 cents = a ridiculous amount of money. Or we build a scraper. It would be cheaper than the API, but we'd still need the human element to make sure it's actually a good deal. We take into account number of stops, airlines, etc. I see potential for a computer/human combo in the future, but right now our flight searchers are doing great and we don't feel that automating the process would make the business significantly better.
- natch 9y agoOuch, their site triggers one of my pet peeves about travel sites, listing prices without clarity whether the deal is one-way or round trip. NYC to Paris: $260 Normal Roundtrip Price: $900 So did people who got that deal save $380? Or did they save $640? Which is it? As feedback to Scott and Brian, this actually makes me hesitate to sign up for premium, because I don't know what level of discount we're talking about here. A 2x difference (one way versus RT) is significant.
- jly 9y agoAll of their listings are roundtrip. I have personally booked sub or around-$400 return trips to Europe from the US using this service.
- bkidwell 9y agoWow, thanks for the feedback! Almost every single deal we send out is roundtrip. This is actually why we put "normal roundtrip price" instead of just "normal price" to help clarify this. Maybe instead we should do "Roundtrip NYC to Paris: $260" and then put "Normal Price: $900" to help clear this up. Thoughts?
- wangarific 9y agoDoesn't sound like you lose anything if you include roundtrip
- LarryPage 9y agoI had the exact same question and hesitation.
- piptastic 9y agoWhy not just put Roundtrip in both to be as clear as possible?
- bkidwell 9y agoI'd actually rather put "Past Roundtrip Deal" above the deal info just because of how big the word "Roundtrip" is. We have to keep design in mind... and if we just put RT that would likely lead to confusion as well.
- smaili 9y agoI hate to be the one to ask, but how much moat does this actually have? Couldn't Kayak literally just add a subscribe or alert me later input and have their massive infrastructure automate this very thing?
- bhaile 9y agoSome deals require specific starting and end destinations to work properly with a specific carrier. Others can require a stopover in a certain city before continuing on. The really good deals will even be site specific. All this can be done via good expertise. With scraping and this type of logic, you'd get blocked quickly from the major sites.
- morgante 9y agoKayak does have alert notifications. The thing is that if you're looking for a very specific destination, you'll almost never get the best deals. Flight deals work best for people who are very flexible about destination and timing.
- akg_67 9y agoSecond this. Some of my friends and I use Scott's emails to discover cheap fares to any destination. We typically don't have any specific destination in mind. When one of us sees Scott's email with attractive deal, we check Google flights for appropriate dates (typically 7-10 days trip) and ping each other to see who is interested in that trip and dates. Then we just book flights typically within 2-6 hours of receiving email. Afterward we research the destination, decide rest of the itinerary for the trip, and book AirBnBs. We call it travel easter egg hunting.
- biztos 9y agoI use Kayak and Google as starting points for every flight search, and I still spend hours and hours finding good fares on good routes. This is just anecdotal, but if neither Kayak nor Google gets it right enough for me to use them end-to-end, I suspect there's a lot of room for a high-touch, human-intervention kind of searching.
- jly 9y agoAwesome writeup. It's great to see companies that can make this work without taking any funding. I had no idea there were so many people behind this. I have nothing to add except that I've been a very happy paid customer for several months now. These guys run a fantastic service that has been worth every penny. Yes, some travel companies that have extensive infrastructure could probably do what is being done here, but they don't.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tmaly 9y agoI just listened to the podcast for Scott's Cheap Flights. Fantastic job Courtland. Your podcast is one of my favorites in this space.
- hboon 9y agoCan you recommend other similar podcasts?
- joering2 9y agoIf you receive Scott's emails for longer than one week, you will quickly have the answer to your question "why not to scrap". I think enough people turn to premium member exactly because a personal touch of Scott and his team. You have this feeling this is not simple aggregate -- I always enjoy reading Scott little tips "when you buy ticket to certain city, don't forget to visit specific point of interest". I end up researching those and always came up with fun info, making me believe Scott is pro and knows what he is doing/researching for me. A scrapper will be inhumane and you will quickly realize that and most likely convert 1% of what they convert. Scott - I am very curious how did you initially advertise your newsletter? First weeks/months you were live - how did you get your initial traffic? Thanks!
- dewey 9y agoThis is in the article, search for Business Insider.
- desireco42 9y agoDefinitely great business and great example of side business.
- kingosticks 9y agoI recently subscribed to the UK version of this (https://www.jacksflightclub.co.uk https://www.jacksflightclub.co.uk). I didn't know there was a US version, I guess there might be lots of similar services. I wonder who came first.
- bkidwell 9y agoWe have plenty of copycats out there (one of the downsides of us trying to share our learnings online haha). I'd just look at when the domains were purchased if you want to know who was first ;) Also, we send deals from almost every continent (launching Africa by the end of the year).
- chrisballinger 9y agoSomething I've noticed that's lacking from most aggregators like Kayak and SkyScanner (my current fave), is the ability to increase the price of the ultra-budget carriers by adding their carry-on baggage fees and whatnot. I don't care about checked bag fees, but some of the carry-on fees are ridiculous ($60 per overhead item?). These budget carriers are cheating the system by looking like the cheapest option, when in reality one of the more expensive carriers is actually cheaper once you compare them apples-to-apples.
- throwahey 9y agoHate to piggyback but I noticed that whenever this service gets posted on Reddit there are dozens of accounts that reply addressing Scott by name and have little to say. Upon checking their comment history, I saw that most users hadn't posted anything for months, or even ever. It was clear that there was some kind of voting manipulation going on, and as reddit goes, if something gains traction it's bound to get upvoted just because. It's a bit like Candy Japan, who posts here once a month with very little to say, and nothing vaguely technical in his articles. These kinds of posts just seem like blatant advertising. What are the rules for self-promotion of services on HN? It just seems dirty when there is a half-hearted article advertising a service without being labeled as an ad. Throwaway of course, because I'd rather not get attacked by some bots.
- arjunrc 9y agoCan you post some of these reddit links? I'd imagine several small businesses these days would opt for the "vote manipulation" marketing since its easy. (The Silicon Valley TV show had a similar plot point).
- maksimum 9y agoI'll do you one better, "Reddit For Sale", investigatie journalism in a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxNvUWN3vYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxNvUWN3vYk
- cbhl 9y ago
- Taylor_OD 9y agoI've been on the list for a little while. I havnt booked any flights from the deals yet because I've got a fair bit of traveling planned already this year but I'm starting to look at flights for next year. Check out the list if you havnt. I live in chicago and flights anywhere are usually $500 or less.
- jmarbach 9y agoDisclosure: I built a competing tool for finding cheap flights, https://concorde.io https://concorde.io. I think the secret of Scott's success is his incredible writing ability. Finding the cheap flights is the easy part. Communicating with users in a way that consistently wins over their hearts and minds takes a high level of consideration and creativity. This writing ability combined with his co-founder's understanding and application of direct response marketing has produced fantastic results. I am glad to see their success.
- dabernathy89 9y agoFYI: I am trying to update my user settings (for my airport preferences) but it won't let me without re-entering my CC information.
- jmarbach 9y agoThank you for mentioning this. I'm sorry for the unnecessary repetitive credit card input. My plan is to separate the editing of payment and location preference to their own pages in the future.
- sfbay 9y agoNice website. Fix this issue: 1) When I search with a date, it loses the depart and return dates every time. Save the dates and remember them. 2) After I select a depart date calender as Month September, it should open September when I select Return calendar.
- jmarbach 9y agoThank you for the feedback! Agreed that the depart and return date inputs should be improved as you mention. I am always seeking to eliminate needless repetitive actions! I'll do my best to get this resolved quickly.
- jontas 9y agoTiny suggestion: I was looking at flights and it was not immediately clear to me that Santa Cruz referred to Bolivia and not California. It almost made me disregard it and not click. May want to put the country name on the homepage as well.
- lavezzi 9y agoStill don't see the appeal. I get better and quicker results from theflightdeal.com and flyertalk.
- mherdeg 9y agoAs far as I can tell Theflightdeal is basically the same service -- a small army of people searches for fares (HOPEFULLY WITH SOME AUTOMATION!), checks whether there are any results whose price is very low relative to historical prices they have logged for that route, and publishes a blog post if the price is very low. They have little blurbs about each destination prewritten so it's very easy to make the blog post once they see a good fare. ("Good deal" is computed either on a cents-per-mile basis or on a low-price-per-segment basis for certain special routes.) Often a human reads through the fare rules (I'm guessing they just use expertflyer, heh) and adds a bit of extra color like booking class, advance purchase restrictions, purchase-by date, etc. to help save people some time. That blog gets money from affiliate revenue (click thru from their blog post and book travel and they often earn a percentage). Very clever, tremendously successful in the niche. Looker pivoted into doing something similar but with a mobile app (after first trying to do REALLY hard big-data work I think). They seem to perform the same kind of analysis, but with more automation and less reliance on spreadsheet. They use a really interesting input stream (real-time search query results from a GDS -- so, actual booked flights) to alert people when a route they care about is cheap vs typical prices. Other services exist which do the same thing but for premium-cabin travel; these services tend not to be public facing and try to charge ridiculous prices in part because J/F travel carries a certain cachet and also in part because those deals tend to be considerably more fragile. There are afaict somewhere like 10-100 of these "deal newsletter" business models doing basically the same work as the deal blogs but trying to make money on subscriptions. Very clever, I definitely respect the hustle.
- gommm 9y agoAny recommended services for premium-cabin travel? Email is in my profile. Thanks!
- 9y ago
- knownothing 9y agoSo now people are paying other people to browse FlyerTalk for them? At least if you're part of the forum you can contribute back to the community.
- jwong_ 9y agoOne thing I'd like to vent about is that Scott seems to be making a lot of money selling e-mail addresses. I signed up for a couple different contests using unique e-mail addresses generated specifically for the contest (Yes, they were separate e-mails for separate contests; No, I did not double-dip my entrees). I was then signed up for 2-3 e-mail lists for 3rd party companies over the course of a couple weeks. These companies weren't even doing anything tangentially related to what Scott writes about(cheap flights). I wish it was more transparent that he was going to sign you up for these random companies.
- sanj 9y agoAnother data point: I haven't seen any email indicating that Scott's selling the addresses.
- jwong_ 9y agoHave you signed up for any of the contests? I think it specifically targets people who entered contests.
- joelrunyon 9y agoSigning up for a contest that SCF promoted is completely different than signing up for the SCF service itself. Big difference. I suspect you know it too.
- bkidwell 9y agoHey, I'm just going to post the same response I used in the IndieHackers comment section for someone with a similar concern. Here's what I said: "Our subscribers are too important to us to ever sell their information to someone else. We never have and never will sell users information like that. Our only source of income is subscriptions and occasional advertisements in the free emails. Ruining our reputation to make a few extra bucks would be an extremely stupid decision on our end. With that said, we do run promotions with partners where we give away awesome vacation packages (Mexico and Tokyo recently). If anyone signs up for one of these promotions they are agreeing to the terms and conditions, which clearly state that by signing up for the giveaway the email address will be distributed to all of the partners involved in the giveaway (typically 4-5 other companies)." And their response: "Thanks for the reply! I looked through my emails and found that the emails started right after I entered a giveaway from you. So that explains it! You're right, it does say for the giveaway offer that you're signing up for emails. Sorry that I jumped to conclusions. It's just that I get a lot of spam and it's very annoying. Also, your partner emails provided no value to me at all." -- With that said, it looks like we could do a better job making it even more explicit (which we try to do in the emails announcing the giveaway). We'll work on this on our end and never intended to mislead anyone.
- Huhty 9y agoWhat fascinates me with this story is how low tech everything was. A simple landing page, email list/newsletter, and "value" in the form of travel deals. Anyone can do it, and the barrier of entry is minimal.
- taphangum 9y agoTech provides leverage horizontally, not vertically. As programmers, we often fool ourselves into believing the opposite.
- tomerbd 9y agowhat do you mean i don't understand the horizontal / vertial
- DontGiveTwoFlux 9y agoVertical - the actual thing that provides customer value. Horizontal - scaling up your application to lots of customers. Scaling software is easy, there's no factory to buy more equipment for. Creating business value is much harder.
- jpindar 9y agoOK, so how many of us are wondering what other kinds of products this would work for? I've seen similar newsletters for books, for Amazon Subscribe & Save, and for low cost Amazon items.
- RepressedEmu 9y agowhat is the one for low cost Amazon items? I've been thinking about starting a daily store of weird items but this seems like a good idea also. Like sub $20 gift ideas/wacky items
- petercooper 9y agoMight not be it, but https://camelcamelcamel.com https://camelcamelcamel.com tracks the biggest price drops on Amazon each day.
- moeamaya 9y agoSolid ideas but I think they may struggle with lower margins. With flights you save X00s but with Amazon X0s. Saw this with all the Airbnb for...since hotel replacement is similarly a higher margin/value purchase. On that note you may be able to this with cars, hotels, real estate, luxury watches, computers, etc
- chriskingnet 9y agoI'm not a fan of the fact that on their website the testimonials are the same (with the currency changed) no matter what location I choose. The destinations in the locations are of course also the same, so it just kinda seems like they are trying to trick me. Kind of reinforcing the feeling I generally get from this kind of business. If they have that many happy users, they could at least get real testimonials from each place.
- blhack 9y agoWhat is happening here? http://imgur.com/a/1c8Nj http://imgur.com/a/1c8Nj You posted this identical comment both here, on an account that has only a few posts over the last 5 years or so, and on what looks like a throwaway.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- losiiiii 9y agoI'm not a fan of the fact that on their website the testimonials are the same (with the currency changed) no matter what location I choose. The destinations in the locations are of course also the same, so it just kinda seems like they are trying to trick me. Kind of reinforcing the feeling I generally get from this kind of business. If they have that many happy users, they could at least get real testimonials from each place.
- BryanBryce 9y agoThe system is down
- IPS3c 9y agoHidden fees and baggage charges are the worst. Airlines need to be more up front with their charges. This is a cool business model though.