

Hipmunk founders Steve & Adam honored in 30 under 30 - kn0thing
http://www.inc.com/30under30/2011/profile-steve-huffman-adam-goldstein-founders-hipmunk.html

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danielhodgins
Hipmunk has a great product, strong brand and a promising business model. It
sounds like they are targeting more of an early adopter technology audience in
the hopes that the 'digerati' will eventually spread it to the early majority
and late majority. Both of my parents use Expedia out of habit, and even
though it sucks they have learned how to use it and would only switch to
Hipmunk momentarily if I hounded them. Even though much of technology is
painful to use the prospect of learning yet another new tool exceeds the pain
of using something that sucks but gets the job done.

One way for Hipmunk to reach the baby boomer demographic would be to build
awareness among the 18-35 link-happy crowd and let them demonstrate it to
their parents thus creating a seamless user recruitment experience.

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kn0thing
Stop reading my marketing plan! ;) I'm hoping for a rocking campaign in the
run up to Thanksgiving to get all of our young geeky users to teach their
parents so they'll spend less time searching for flights/hotels and more time
for pie!

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bsmith
"Advertising in this space is completely non-economical..."

Interesting, because I see ads for them on an almost daily basis, yet I barely
travel. Maybe they just recently figured this out?

Nonetheless, I love the product—I use it for what little travel I do—and I'm
definitely a word-of-mouth proponent.

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suking
It is probably re-targeting if you hit their site before. I doubt they are
doing massive media buys.

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kanamekun
I also see their ads everywhere, and I have never ever visited hipmunk.

Some discussion of this over on Quora (the discussion is inconclusive, but it
highlights that others have also seen many Hipmunk ads):
[http://www.quora.com/How-much-is-Hipmunk-spending-on-
adverti...](http://www.quora.com/How-much-is-Hipmunk-spending-on-advertising-
each-month)

~~~
suking
Looks like they're advertising on tiny (relative), tech-related sites. People
that have probably heard of them - just for branding. Probably with remnant
inventory, which is fairly cheap. I doubt they are spending much at all.

