6 ms·

Ask HN: My strange pain point – is it a startup idea?

11 points by get 9y ago

I travel pretty often. I'm not exactly a digital nomad but I like to stay in cities around in other cities and do whatever I would have done at home otherwise. Mostly working on web projects. And it's insane, how much time I spent on AirBnB and Booking.com, looking for the right apartments. Hours and hours of work that could be replaced with a simple database query if they had structured data. But even without, it could be made much easier with the right interface. Two of my requirements make it so hard: 1) Top floor. I don't like people running 'on my head'. 2) A view. I don't like to look out of the window and stare at another house. So I have to look at each offer on AirBnB and Booking.com and try to figure out if it matches those. This is hard enough. I even became super good at finding the apartments on Google Earth so I can look at them from the outside. Insane. To add insult to injury, neither of the two sites offer to tag apartments as "I don't like it". So when I look at the same city another day, I have to start over and look at all those apartments I already looked at again. On AirBnB I abuse the 'Wishlist' feature to mark apartments as 'Dont like it'. So my 'wishlists' are really 'dont wish lists'. But at least it somewhat works. They mark apartments on one of your wishlists with a heart. So I know that the apartments with a heart are those that I don't like :) Since they only allow 50 or so apartments on a wishlist, I have multiple wishlists for every city. Realizing how much time I spend on this, I am considering to hire somebody for it. So I will have a database with apartments with a view. What do you guys think? Should I then put it online? Like 'Nomad list with a view'? Or am I a unique snowflake? Or does something like this already exist?

sharemywin 9y ago
a place where people could build sql queries and save them for others. Maybe you could use: http://commoncrawl.org http://commoncrawl.org I kinda remember a site that saves html in tables to be queried.
gallerdude 9y ago
I don't think there's a huge audience for this.
hodl 9y ago
Practical problem is how do you get hosts to provide all this extra info and trust them to be honest and accurate. I can't even search for real estate and specify houses without getting apartments or vice versa
- get 9y ago
  I would just do what I already do. Look carefully at each apartment to see if it could have a nice view. I judge it by the photos, the description, customer reviews and Google street view. Only apartments that might have a nice view go into my list. I wonder if anybody else is interested in that list and if it would make an interesting website.
dirktheman 9y ago
I used to work in the travel industry. You wouldn't believe the explicit wishes/demands of people: bed size, shower type, hard floors, no stairs, fridge, no yellow lights (really), double ply TP, south facing windows, vincinity of freeway exit, you name it. The thing is: there's an infinite number of data you'd have to gather. I feel your pain (we need a children's cot and that alone is almost impossible to filter with AirBnB) but it'll be really hard.
- get 9y ago
  This is a misunderstanding. I would not gather data about bed size or shower type. All I want to do is assemble a list of top floor apartments with a view.
  - timdavila 9y ago
    Those are your requirements. Dirk is saying yours is one of a long list of very specific requirements people have requested in the past. You asked about a startup idea, so he is generalizing the problem to make it applicable for more users than just yourself, and pointing out how complicated it would be.
    - get 9y ago
      I understood that. But as I said, it's a misunderstanding. I am not thinking about a generalization. I am thinking about a site that lists apartments with a view. That's it. I wonder if that has enough merits to become a startup.
      - Kevin_S 9y ago
        I'd say prob not. Everyone has dealbreakers, and I would guess relatively few have "with a view" and not anything else.
      - rajacombinator 9y ago
        Definitely not by itself. It could be a form of content marketing if you’re selling other stuff. Figuring out which Airbnbs have nice views is not really hard compared to all the other location optimization parameters out there.
Joona 9y ago
For tagging apartments as "I don't like it", you could create a browser extension that automatically hides them. That aside, I think dirktheman's comment is relevant; I don't think the data you want is useful for most other users.
- get 9y ago
  I never use browser extensions because of the security and privacy problems. When you say 'most other users' - can you quantify that? If for example 99% of the world population does not care, that would still leave me with 76 million people who do care.
  - jaredsohn 9y ago
    If you build it yourself for yourself, you should be able to have some confidence re: security and privacy.
irremediable 9y ago
Probably too small a demand. The general problem is property search with lots of options, and even that is a tricky niche... I worked at a company that tried to do this, and in the end we found it's too much work per niche. Maybe if NLP gets a lot better.
- get 9y ago
  Can you quantify the small demand somehow? Is an apartment with a view not something many people want? When I look at r/digitalnomad, the top post right now is somebody showing of the view of their apartment. Booking.com has a filter 'View'. So there must be some demand, right? The filter just does not work. When I look at apartments with a view in Bangkok the first 3 they show me are: https://www.booking.com/hotel/th/bangkokshortstay-3br-sukhumvit.html https://www.booking.com/hotel/th/bangkokshortstay-3br-sukhum... https://www.booking.com/hotel/th/aspira-parc-39.html https://www.booking.com/hotel/th/aspira-parc-39.html https://www.booking.com/hotel/th/ekkamai-prestige.html https://www.booking.com/hotel/th/ekkamai-prestige.html None of these are what I mean with an apartment with a view. Some are just hotel rooms. Some seem to not have a view.
  - irremediable 9y ago
    Estimate how many people are searching for property at a given time, how many of them would use your view-focused site (a tiny fraction), how many of them would find something through it and hence give you income (probably referral bonus from whatever big property listers you're partnering with). Now weigh that against the cost of creating/running a site, and digging out the properties with a view. I've not done this rigorously at all. But in the site I worked on, I suspect people filtering by facets similar to "has a view" were, optimistically, about 1% of our engaged audience. Conversion rates were like 5%. So that was probably a few tens of people per day (we had a fairly big audience!) If you monetise by referral bonuses, you'll probably get tens of dollars per referral. So at most ~100USD per day. Now consider the costs of setting up and running such a site. Remember that we were a global property search engine -- to get that thousands-strong audience, we were running all over the world. IMO it just doesn't add up. You can always prove me wrong! One way might be to focus on high-end clients, and somehow make more money from them... larger referral bonuses, for example, or having the clients pay you to find them properties with a good view. But yeah, I remain sceptical.
_wmd 9y ago
I feel your pain. I've been travelling for the past 6 months, and have become the world's foremost critic of booking.com's UI in that time. That site, despite dominating the entire planet when it comes to such things, has no option to select [x] I REQUIRE A DESK TO WORK FROM It's unbelievable how far gone these sites are from scenarios like yours and mine, and it'd be so easy to fix up. Or they lack any understanding of the areas they market. I'm currently in Kathmandu, can I filter hotels by those that have a heater and hot running water? Of course not, but sure, I can filter by 100 options like "Airport shuttle", "24/7 front desk", and differentiate between a "hostel" and a "lodge", or whether the room has "soundproofing", 99% of these of which every hotel will tick yes to. Another pain point -- WiFi. There are 100 ways they could measure this, but not a single one implemented, even a sliding "how shit was your connection? during the review, or, say, a surreptitious "How was your check-in?" e-mail that runs a miniature JS speed test in the background Another travelling scenario - short term contracts around London. I don't care where I sleep, I care about rail and bus routes _only_. Can I search by that on any site? Of course not Meanwhile I actually built a niche site around that last one, but it can't stand on its own -- it'd never become popular or turn any kind of profit, the only hope is that a big site with roaring revenues like Booking.com would somehow see the need, and spend a few working days worth of developer time on it. But that'll never happen, because the improvement to their bottom line would most probably be minimal -- I'll still use booking.com whether or not they implement the feature, because there are so view viable alternatives in this sector
- get 9y ago
  Would love to see your site. If you want to get in touch - I have put my email on my profile.
zapperdapper 9y ago
I hear you - I've often wanted a feature to reject apartments/hotels without an outdoor pool (don't like indoor pools). The trouble is building a database is going to be a huge project and "view" is a little subjective. Wouldn't you have to basically replicate AirBnB's database but with a better interface? You would probably end up doing something like web crawling TripAdvisor or something like that (which is against their policies by the way). Or is the plan to allow people to build their own personal lists from Booking.com, TripAdvisor, AirBnB etc.? - if the latter I think that is a good idea, but ultimately you've still got to find those apartments so you run into the original problem again. p.s. writing this from 32 floor apartment with a spectacular view out over Manila. Not top floor but I've heard nothing at all from above me! (Booked via AirBnB)
- get 9y ago
  My 'plan' is very simple. It's just a list of links for each city. No community features or anything. Just the links to apartments that I myself found. Features could be added later. But the initial idea is to just put a list of links online. Probably with a line 'If you know about an apartment with a great view you want to share, please send it to ...@...'. If you like, let me know which apartment it is in Manila and I will happily add it :)
  - zapperdapper 9y ago
    Great idea then! Twin Oaks Place, Manila. View from 32nd floor out over Manila is incredible especially at night. There are even distant mountains you can see once the smog clears in the morning! ;)
    - get 9y ago
      Thanks! The "One-Bedroom Apartment" here? https://www.booking.com/hotel/ph/30-cd-twin-oaks-place.html https://www.booking.com/hotel/ph/30-cd-twin-oaks-place.html I wonder if one is guaranteed to get it with a view or it could happen that you book and end up in a lower floor?
DoreenMichele 9y ago
I will suggest that people who want it with a view may be a small number, but probably a well heeled group. That absolutely does not make the radar of people on a budget. So if you build it, you might be able to charge a membership fee.
NumberCruncher 9y ago
What about sendin an automated massage to the landlord like "top floor with nice view?". What about not giving a fuck about such unimportant things and spending your time more wisely? I mean if I want to live every month in a different accommodation I can not expect having the same comfort than in my dream flat. It's like expecting that the food at a restaurant tastes like being cooked by my mother.

dirktheman 9y ago

I'm going to steal your idea here but then for apartments with long beds! All jokes aside, as a startup idea this would narrow your market down too much, I think. The number of people with specific apartment demands > number of people who want an apartment with a view. I could see some merit in having a site with a very large amount of very specific attributes that you can filter. But it's pain in the neck to gather all this data. But don't take my word for it! If I could find a site that lists airBnB apartments with baby cots, a potty and socket covers I'd be sold!

get 9y ago
"this would narrow your market down too much" How do you know? Can you quantify that somehow? "people with specific apartment demands > number of people who want an apartment with a view" The same could be said for every site. There is always a generalization that targets more people. One essential advice for startups these days is that the initial target audience can very well be small. It's interesting to see that 'too small of a target audience' is the main counter argument in this discussion. How big was the estimated target audience for AirBnBs original offering to house people on air mattresses?
- hluska 9y ago
  It's interesting to me that, instead of internalizing what people are saying, you argue with them. If you're that convinced that your market is big enough, fucking build it. It's even more interesting that as soon as someone gave you an actionable way to create this using existing services (a browser extension), you jumped on it because of privacy/security. When you're looking at preferences, the range is absolutely immense. Tagging an apartment as having "a view" does not mean that that view will be of what you want. The alternative is using a degree of ML or perhaps AI to learn what kind of view you find pleasing and tailor suggestions to you. Yet, this alternative is worse for privacy than a browser extension and building it would be obscenely expensive so you'd need some hope of going after a big market to make it worth it.
- dirktheman 9y ago
  You're reading too much into my words, I think. I meant the market size of "people with specific demands" is by definition larger than the subset "people with the specific demand of x". And yes, while it can't hurt starting with a small audience, you do have to find a way to broaden your market at some point. And stating 'if only 1% of the world population uses this it's still 76 million' isn't a very good way to define market size and there isn't a VC who will take this seriously. It's funny that you bring up AirBnB because there is a well known story about their market size that Brian Chesky likes to tell: Brian Chesky has a funny story that he tells about their continual difficulty guessing market size. The Airbnb founders had no idea how large it was. How do you measure the size of the market for airbed rentals at conferences and political events? Before one particularly important VC meeting, they put together a slide that asserted the size of the market was "$200 MM per year". Nate (one of the founders) felt deeply uncomfortable with this figure, and insisted they reduce it. So, they changed it to $20 MM. Shortly before the investor meeting, Brian and Joe (without Nate) met with (now YC partner) Sam Altman, who told them "Investors like Billions not Millions, baby, so change the 'm's ' to 'b's!" So, Brian and Joe changed the market size to $2 Billion -- unbeknownst to Nate -- who was shocked to see the much larger market size slide for the first time in the investor meeting... Later on, after YC, when they first met with Sequoia, one of the partners there told them sequoia had been looking at the vacation rentals market for a long time -- and did they know that the vacation rental market was a $40 billion a year industry? You asked for an opinion if this would be a good idea for a startup. I gave you my honest insight. I'm not claiming to know everything or even to be right, but I don't have to prove you wrong by quantifying why your market size would be too small. My advice to you: if you ask for an opinion you either say 'thank you', ask for clarification, or prove my assumptions wrong. Right now it seems that all you want to hear is 'it's a great idea!'.
  - get 9y ago
    Right now it seems that all you want to hear is 'it's a great idea!'. No! If there are counter arguments, I want to hear them! The more replies I get without counter arguments that convince me, the more I get the feeling this actually might be a good idea. Because if everybody tries to discourage me and all the arguments are just 'feelings' then maybe there are no hard facts that speak against it. For example you said that you would steal the idea for apartments with long beds. This is an interesting argument. Because it made me compare Google trends for 'hotel with long bed' and 'hotel with view'. I also did that for 'hard floor' and all the other parameters you mentioned. And I saw that the demand for a view is by far the biggest. My advice to you: if you ask for an opinion you either say 'thank you'. Thank you!
    - dirktheman 9y ago
      Ha! We're alike in the sense that the more people tell me it can't be done, the harder I work to prove the opposite. To sum up my counterarguments: I have a feeling the market size isn't goint to be big, and it's going to be pretty hard. And you're right, both arguments are not fact based. Also: thank you for this reply. I re-read my parent comment and in hindsight I sound rather condescending. Not my intention, and I apologize. All the best with your 'AirBnB with a view'!
      - get 9y ago
        Great! I'm happy I did not completely disgruntle you and you still speak with me. I can be way too undiplomatic at times. Small market + Hard problem sums up the responses here nicely. I like that! Because I'm not convinced the market is too small. And because I love hard problems! I wonder what format I should use for my list so I can put it online easily... hmm... It would have to be one list for each city. Maybe I should put it all in one sqlite db and write a script that renders it to static pages, one page for each city?