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My 2 cents: It’s really hard to get consumers to switch behaviors for something they already can do through other means. Perhaps this is more efficient in some

My 2 cents: It’s really hard to get consumers to switch behaviors for something they already can do through other means. Perhaps this is more efficient in some respect, but only if you ignore the inefficiency of changing your ways to learn a new tool, and further separate it from your existing communications medium (ie text messaging or whatever). I don’t feel like the value proposition is super high here. In general people only tend to use 7 apps, and to create something for a rare activity will be very hard to keep in mind when you go to do it. So capturing the moment when people need to do it with when they find out about you is difficult to time… and that’s if you can convince them to try something new at all. If you’re going consumer specifically for trip planning, I’d focus more on specific pain points versus “nice to haves”. It’s not clear from the website that pain points are considered. It also feels very structured, eg that you know how long you’d stop at a given place. In practice I don’t think many people operate that way, especially for a vacation unless they have reservations. I’d suggest finding a niche with clear pain points that this solves, and then focus on that demographic. That may likely not include consumers. Good luck, it’s really hard to make something new, put yourself out there, and know whether to stick with it or not. I’ve been down this road before. If you don’t try, it really won’t work!

jaflo 5y ago
I definitely agree that it is difficult to make users switch if there isn't enough of a value add. I was hoping for features like the suggestions and voting to give enough of a reason to switch, but admit that it might not be enough. I really appreciate your comment about finding a niche and fixing pain points there. Certainly a less clear path, but more fruitful too as you mentioned. Good points, thank you for taking the time to put this together!
noirbot 5y ago
I think I mostly agree with you, but I definitely have a set of apps that I install for only trips. I had a trip back in November with 6 people in total, and plenty of sub-groups going off to do stuff, along with full-group reservations with fixed times. It would have been helpful to have something like this instead of having to search a text thread repeatedly to work out when dinner reservations are and on which days. One specific idea - There's apps like this where if I could pay a sort of "rental" fee to create a calendar for one event instead of a full time subscription, that would be great. I don't do big group trips that need something like this all the time, but I'd maybe pay $10 or such for access for 2 months for 4-8 people. One really important feature for me would be some good time-zone support as well, both for trips that may span different time zones, and for converting from local to remote trip times.
- azinman2 5y ago
  Why not just use google calendar? You can invite people to events, so it doesn’t need to be a shared calendar.
  - noirbot 5y ago
    Mostly because I dislike and prefer not to use Google. It's also just nice to not co-mingle accounts in that way for something this specific. I have an app I use exclusively for holding my flight information for any flights I take. I don't use it a lot, but it's nice to know that I have one single app to look in for flight info. If I'd unified all my eventing around Google Cal or such, then yea, I could probably just use that, but I didn't, so having a few purpose-built apps is nice.
- heyitsguay 5y ago
  Just use your favorite online spreadsheet - for group trips with more than about 3 people, I've been using Google Sheets for trip planning for years. It's easy, effective, and free.
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  - noirbot 5y ago
    Fair, but A. what's a good non-Google or MSFT spreadsheet option, and B. that generally feels like worse UX than something like this. This feels like a different flavor of "Why would anyone use Slack/Discord when you could just use IRC." You're not wrong, but there's something nice about purpose-built apps that have tools meant to solve specific problems instead of using a more generic tool to try to solve multiple specific problems. It's not as if I don't have other ways to solve these problems but having one nice neat tool that does a thing is useful. A good example is an app I just re-installed for a trip - Splitwise. It's nice for splitting bills for various things among sub-sets of people on a trip together. It could absolutely be handled by a spreadsheet, but then someone would have to make that spreadsheet, and make sure it did the math right and had enough rows, and handled odd scenarios like non-even bills.
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jaflo 5y ago

I definitely agree that it is difficult to make users switch if there isn't enough of a value add. I was hoping for features like the suggestions and voting to give enough of a reason to switch, but admit that it might not be enough. I really appreciate your comment about finding a niche and fixing pain points there. Certainly a less clear path, but more fruitful too as you mentioned. Good points, thank you for taking the time to put this together!

noirbot 5y ago

I think I mostly agree with you, but I definitely have a set of apps that I install for only trips. I had a trip back in November with 6 people in total, and plenty of sub-groups going off to do stuff, along with full-group reservations with fixed times. It would have been helpful to have something like this instead of having to search a text thread repeatedly to work out when dinner reservations are and on which days. One specific idea - There's apps like this where if I could pay a sort of "rental" fee to create a calendar for one event instead of a full time subscription, that would be great. I don't do big group trips that need something like this all the time, but I'd maybe pay $10 or such for access for 2 months for 4-8 people. One really important feature for me would be some good time-zone support as well, both for trips that may span different time zones, and for converting from local to remote trip times.

azinman2 5y ago
Why not just use google calendar? You can invite people to events, so it doesn’t need to be a shared calendar.
- noirbot 5y ago
  Mostly because I dislike and prefer not to use Google. It's also just nice to not co-mingle accounts in that way for something this specific. I have an app I use exclusively for holding my flight information for any flights I take. I don't use it a lot, but it's nice to know that I have one single app to look in for flight info. If I'd unified all my eventing around Google Cal or such, then yea, I could probably just use that, but I didn't, so having a few purpose-built apps is nice.
heyitsguay 5y ago
Just use your favorite online spreadsheet - for group trips with more than about 3 people, I've been using Google Sheets for trip planning for years. It's easy, effective, and free.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- noirbot 5y ago
  Fair, but A. what's a good non-Google or MSFT spreadsheet option, and B. that generally feels like worse UX than something like this. This feels like a different flavor of "Why would anyone use Slack/Discord when you could just use IRC." You're not wrong, but there's something nice about purpose-built apps that have tools meant to solve specific problems instead of using a more generic tool to try to solve multiple specific problems. It's not as if I don't have other ways to solve these problems but having one nice neat tool that does a thing is useful. A good example is an app I just re-installed for a trip - Splitwise. It's nice for splitting bills for various things among sub-sets of people on a trip together. It could absolutely be handled by a spreadsheet, but then someone would have to make that spreadsheet, and make sure it did the math right and had enough rows, and handled odd scenarios like non-even bills.

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