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Launch HN: Travelchime (YC W19) – Doc for travel planning with friends
We're Peter and Harry, and we're building Travelchime (https://travelchime.com https://travelchime.com).
Travelchime is like Google Docs for planning vacation travel with your friends' recommendations. It lets you add places and attractions you're looking to visit to a doc, export them to Google Maps, and collaborate with your friends who've been there or are going there with you.
We used to plan our trips using Google Docs and Sheets, but it was a pain. We'd write the documents, then had to add the same places to a map for when we're on the trip. We also often sent these out to friends who asked -- there's nobody whose recommendations you trust more than your friends -- but it's hard to find which friends have these docs.
We built Travelchime to solve this. With Travelchime, you can:
1. Add all the museums, restaurants, and places you're staying/want to visit to a doc on Travelchime, and see them on a map with their opening times, links to Yelp, and more
2. Share the doc with friends on the trip or ask others for recommendations: multiple people can edit/suggest at the same time, just like Google Docs [1]
3. Export the places to Google Maps for when you're on the go
4. (Optional) Read some itineraries from around the web to get inspired! We use basic machine learning [2] to parse itineraries for the places they mention to help get you started
5. Once you’ve gone on the trip, you can share the full itinerary with notes to inspire your friends
We haven’t monetized, but will eventually link out to hotels that work well with your itinerary and get affiliate commissions there.
We've gotten a ton of support from Hacker News in the past: when Yale shut down our courses website, Hacker News rallied and got the attention on it to save it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7060261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7060261), and past HN launches (e.g., for WrapAPI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11423070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11423070) got us our first paying customers. We love the direct feedback we get, so if you're planning a trip soon, give it a shot and let us know what you think either here or by email at peter@travelchime.com!
[1] To enable real-time editing, we use Quill (https://quilljs.com/ https://quilljs.com/) and ShareDB (https://github.com/share/sharedb https://github.com/share/sharedb), both amazing projects. We had also tried Draft.js, Slate, so if you want to chat text editing hit us up!
[2] A combination of Google's Entity Recognition API, Google Maps' APIs, and human checkers
[3] For those curious: we <3 React and have an all-Javascript stack with Node.js and MySQL on the back-end
- nsx147 8y agoThere is definitely something here. It would be nice to have a service aggregate and split costs for the whole trip. And help planning it
- arciini 8y agoWe're interested in building this out, especially with the launch of a standalone mobile app (unlike the web-app that we have here). How do you currently aggregate/split costs for the trip? Do you just use a spreadsheet?
- yingw787 8y agoWow, this is really cool! I built something kind of similar after college as a proof-of-concept and to learn JavaScript/React: https://yingw787.github.io/traveltile_docs/ https://yingw787.github.io/traveltile_docs/ I worried about the monetization model, since my expected audience would be people like me (post-college people starting off). Do you have plans to find paying, high-margin customers? I would say that's really important. I supposed that my competition would be sites like TripAdvisor that would sell pre-packaged travel plans to small groups. I would guess it would be because they skim a fee on top, they have liability insurance, or management got talking into them "knowing the terrain" or something, though I don't know for sure. If you could get that audience (older, wealthier couples, I'm guessing) and convince them to pay for this platform instead, you could earn a pretty penny. That probably falls under the "do things that don't scale" category of manually tailoring travel plans. Another thing I considered was the ability to fork an existing travel plan, to tailor to changing environments yet retain the benefits of past experience. Since you never really go on the same trip once, but everybody pretty much goes on the same trip. So all the travel plans would go into a data lake, with certain groups pulling, forking, and contributing back. I did not have the technical expertise to do this at the time. Something to consider :) I wish you the very best of luck, I kind of wish I did what you guys are doing today. I will live vicariously through you :)
- arciini 8y agoTraveltile looks really cool! The documentation is kinda amazing and I'll definitely clone it and play with it later today. Before Travelchime, Peter and I had some experience with monetizing via hotel and flight affiliate fees via our past sites, https://bookwithmatrix.com https://bookwithmatrix.com and https://alltheflightdeals.com https://alltheflightdeals.com . We did a bit of research, and about 2/3 of travelers who use docs start one before they book the hotels. We believe that if our recommendations are good enough (based on where you'd like to go in a trip plan), we could monetize using the same model there. Forking an existing trip plan and copying bits/pieces from friends' trip plans are both features we'd really like to build out really soon! So many of my trips end up having 50%+ overlap with some of my friends, so that'd save a ton of time