One summer in France while I was a kid (from the states, visiting for 6 weeks), I wrote a spell checker in 6502 assembly in a notebook...as I had no access to a computer and my french was terrible, so I had more alone time than I should have had.
I then typed it into my Commodore 64, at home at the end of the summer.
It didn't compile at first (of course) but it was mind-expanding to have so much time to think about the algorithm.
I had totally forgotten this entire incident until this moment.
I've flown from SEA-NYC for $1.86. I flew from YYV to Romania, and onto Turkey, for $200. I flew with my family of 5 in first class from SEA-YTO (Toronto) for $0, on Air Canada. Too many others to count. All from flyertalk. It's not as good as it used to be but there were times I've taken whole flights full of flyertalkers headed somewhere basically for free.
Key to success: Find some friends who also like to do this and who will wake you up in the middle of the night if they find a great deal (and won't complain if you reciprocate). It's hard to watch flyertalk all the time and the deals go quickly.
I actually just started a service to do just that. For $8/m, I'll email/text people when the craziest deals drop. It's temoprarily sitting at amazingairfare.zaccohn.com, if you're interested.
I don't know I'd be willing to pay $8/mo for a service where I don't know if the notifications will be timely enough or of actually good deals. But I would happily pay 10-15% of the ticket price as a finder's fee for any deal that turns out awesome. (Kind of like the recruiter / employee referral model, where the company pays 15-30% of the starting salary as a fee.)
Hard to enforce, though, so you'd most likely have to go on the honor system.
Why not give it the "Magic" treatment? Provider broadcasts emails / text messages. You can respond with some simple code, like "YES" or "BUY". Provider will then attempt to purchase at that rate using stored information. I would think the service fee would be best as a percentage with a minimum.
That's tough because purchasing is often difficult. It took me dozens of tries to get a flight booked to Cypress once, through 4 cities. I ended up deciding the onerous itinerary was not worth the nearly free ticket. That's common so you don't necessarily want to insert yourself into these transactions for people, it really wouldn't scale.
$96 a year. I seem to be sending out 2-3 deals a month, sometimes more. If you book ONE deal (out of 24-36+), and save $400 off average price... it's worth it.
If you don't think that's worth it - then you probably don't fall into the customer segment this is targeted toward. :)
Also, the "finders fee" model requires a ton more work. Integrating with all the 3rd party ticketing sites (kayak, orbitz, priceline), and ALL the first party ones (delta, united... etihad... cebu air... aeroflot... etc etc etc). Considering this is a side project, that quickly becomes prohibitive.
I am probably exactly your target market. But I'm also very particular about the way I fly and optimize for status. The variables in my case are that I'm only really interested in UA flights out of SFO. The likelyhood of a deal like that even showing up at all on the service is very low; which is why I probably won't get anything for my $96.
That said, if something did show up; I would gladly pay that $96, or more, in an instant.
I'm more focused on people who are more interested in going somewhere awesome for not a lot of money than what airline they're flying.
I appreciate the data point, and honestly targeting people like you is probably a larger/more lucrative market. But that would require a lot more building and systems integration, and as this is just a side project, I'm not planning to expand to serve that need. Definitely appreciate the feedback though.
I'm focused on that now, yeah. But even though I can't help you right now... here's a whole section of a site focused on European deals: http://www.secretflying.com/euro-deals/
Keep an eye out there. :) Lots of good stuff coming out of Dublin lately. Shouldn't be too far from you.
One problem with the % cut model is if your service is really good (and finds those $1.86 flight deals), then you get a pittance. Maybe a flat $8 for each deal?
nah, you have to be up for random trips or have a list of places that you would be willing to go if free. It's much less likely that one will pop up conveniently for a trip you need to make any time soon.
Out of curiosity, were those free with or without taxes/fees?
One of my friends about 12 years ago found round trip tickets from NYC to Egypt for $0 + taxes and fees. Fees came to about $100-$200 or so. He immediately bought 10 tickets for himself and friends. So an amazing deal, but still not free when considering taxes and fees.
Those were all-in. The $0 Air Canada one they actually called me and said that technically there was no contract of carriage because there was no money exchanged, but they let me have it anyway. And actually I remember now, it was $200 to Romania, and we ended up paying $230 more to get to turkey on a standard ticket. The Bucharest ticket was surely supposed to be $2000.
Whisper (Venice Beach, CA) - iOS/Android/DevOps. We have a very very small team of client devs and we're looking to grow our team.
The beach is one block away.
You can surf in the morning before work and keep your board and wetsuit in the office :)
We have 2 full-time iOS developers and 3 full-time Android Developers, so it's a big opportunity to join a tight-knit team building an app that our users love.
A former client was on Shark Tank. The pitch in-studio was 2.5 hours and of course only 7 minutes was aired. The interest it generated (in terms of downloads) was enormous. It nearly filled the Heroku database during the show - which we quickly upgraded after it aired.
A good metaphor for the negotiations before and after airing and the actual on-air pitch is an iceberg. 5% is visible on-air and 95% of the interactions with the sharks and their team is never public. What actually happens in terms of an investment may never be made public - from promise to make a deal that falls apart to an on-air rejection that is later turned around into an investment.
We have a team of data scientists that pretty much exclusively use python and a team of server devs that nearly exclusively use Erlang.
I could see a use for this, though I will say we've pretty much made separate services and these services communicate (in order of urgency) - via HTTP, Rabbit, or by rolling HBase tables on some schedule.
Because of that decoupling, this seems less necessary, but I could certainly see a place for it.
