

Ask HN: Review my startup – itripd.com - teddiekgb

Hi HN, http:&#x2F;&#x2F;itripd.com is a travel startup where you can &quot;share your travel adventures and discover others&quot;. Looking for any constructive (or destructive) criticism people may have to offer. Initial target audience is travel bloggers. itripd is intended to be used by travel bloggers in a similar way they already use facebook, pinterest and twitter (to show case their trips) and will act as another channel of traffic to their own web site.
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andrewcross
If I'm understanding correctly, you are hoping this will become a site where
people come for travel inspiration (e.g. I'm thinking of a trip to Thailand,
so I come to your site, see the trips the travel bloggers have put up and go
through them). If that's correct, you're going to have a tremendously hard
time getting this off the ground.

Why don't you just focus on the travel bloggers side to begin with?
Specifically, I think there's a need for a Soundcloud-esque embeddable widget
that people can put directly in their blogs (naturally linking back to you).
THAT provides real value IMO. Most blogs are highly entertaining, but they
rarely have mapped content - you can provide that.

From someone that's founded a travel marketplace & failed, avoid network
effects in the beginning if at all possible. It's a whole other level of pain,
that in your case at least, I don't think is needed.

I'm actually going backpacking for 3 months starting next week, so if you come
out with a widget, I'm more than happy to use the beta versions and give you
feedback.

~~~
doragcoder
> ... avoid network effects in the beginning if at all possible. It's a whole
> other level of pain...

Can you explain what you mean by that? I thought network effects were good.
No?

~~~
andrewcross
Network effects are great...when you have them. But in the beginning you
won't. That's why if you can provide value to an individual user without
requiring network effects, it will make your life a lot easier.

In this case, if you get bloggers using your product, logging their trips,
etc, you'll slowly build up your content. Once it's comprehensive enough for
travellers to get value from it, you'll be able to build network effects from
a much stronger position.

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notjustanymike
There's no search on the homepage. Coming to your site, I decided to find out
about Prague. I had to scroll down to the tiny and dim 'more trips' before I
landed on a page with search.

Then I found out the search is, bluntly put, absolute crap. I typed in
'Italy': nothing. I typed in 'My Weekend in Italy', the name of the first
item: nothing. I typed in 'Argentina' and got 'National Congress of
Argentina'.

If you're trying to build a site about going cool places, I'd recommend making
it possible for me to FIND those cool places.

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archagon
As a traveller and occasional blogger, I like the design a lot. It feels
functional and not as blatantly "social" as other sites in this vein. For my
trips, I already use Google Maps to create maps with all the places I've been
or want to visit in a new city[1]. I'd be very interested in using your site
to create personalized maps in this vein: descriptions, photos, and comments
would make my maps a lot more interesting. However, in order to do this, I'd
need to be able to use different types of pins categorize my places, since
having several dozen photo pins in one place would be too confusing. It would
also be very useful to have a mobile app, as I use these maps on the go.

[1]:
[https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=zU8tVyO_sZdE.kj9h...](https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=zU8tVyO_sZdE.kj9hqWhFYuwE)

~~~
teddiekgb
hi archagon, thanks for the feedback. it's nice to hear from people who would
consider using itripd. Yes, at the moment we only support one pin style. But,
the current pin system does cluster very well so you may find that the
existing clustering system works well for your trips with many pins in close
proximity to each other. I will experiment with some other pin designs in the
meantime. There is no mobile app at the moment but the site functions well in
the browser on tablets and phones. Thanks for the link to your trip :)

------
dc_ploy
Hey, I'm about to go on a euro trip and this seems cool! If possible, could
you add a "path traveled"? Similar to this:
[https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox.js/example/v1.0.0/dynamically-...](https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox.js/example/v1.0.0/dynamically-
drawing-a-line/) or this
[https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox.js/example/v1.0.0/line-
marker/](https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox.js/example/v1.0.0/line-marker/)

Overall this looks cool. Also could you add a "Date" field for each
destination or at least have and option for a "multi city" trip option.

Thanks!

------
personlurking
Cool. If ten people write about relaxing in the Caribbean, will the site list
all 10 posts or somehow favor the best piece?

____

This kind of thing would also work on an expat site where people could give
their impressions of living in X city. Maybe with categorization of person's
general income range, lifestyle and type of experience being shared (so others
of similar ilk could look at what they might encounter in that city).

~~~
dennybritz
I actually like this idea a lot. Most tourists are visiting the same spots,
and most travel sites give me the same stuff. It would be interesting to
follow the daily lives of expats or locals, segmented by what type of work
they are doing, and what kind of lifestyle they have.

These are two pretty different target audiences though. The formers one caters
towards tourists who are about to visit the city for vacation while the latter
caters towards people who are considering moving to that city.

~~~
personlurking
Agreed, and it was something that bothered me when writing my comment because
the OP obviously is only focused on one of those audiences.

I have about 20 cities under my belt (half, foreign) and could do the low-
income version of all of them :D But this would be a good thing to add to the
one or two expat-related sites concerning living costs that have popped up on
HN in recent weeks.

------
giarc
Looks great. I typically user TripAdvisor for my travel research but this
looks great. TA is a bit cluttered and sometimes hard to find exactly what you
are looking for. I like how the person's trip is grouped together.

Because of this grouping, I would suggest 'tags' for the trips. For example,
someone could tag a Toronto trip with "sports" or "hockey". Their trip might
include a trip to the hockey hall of fame, a Leafs game, a trip to the old
Maple Leaf Gardens (now a grocery store). These tags could be pre-determined
by yourself, or user submitted. This way, if I am going to Paris for example,
and I see a trip that is tagged "Music", and I'm not into a music trip, then I
know I should look at someone else's trip for Paris. Thinking about this
though, perhaps each destination within a trip/country could be tagged since
trips often have multiple events with multiple 'tags'. Sorry, I'm just
rambling a bit. I think you get the idea though.

I'll be submitting a few reviews though. Good work!

~~~
teddiekgb
Hi giarc, i always ad the thought to add in 'activities' or 'tags' later on.
But, the more i think about it the more important it becomes to implement as
soon as possible. The big question i need to answer is if they are predefined
or user submitted (as you mentioned in your post). If it just activities then
pre-defined would be ok (there are only so many activities you can do).But, if
I want a user to be able to tag just about anything (for example a user went
to a basketball game and wants to tag a place with 'miamivsdallas') then it
must be user defined. Do you have any more thoughts on this?

------
junto
Clickable: [http://itripd.com](http://itripd.com)

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Mister_Snuggles
Overall, this is really nice!

I found a bug: I started at
[http://itripd.com/trip/4](http://itripd.com/trip/4), scrolled down to the
Desert Safari, clicked it, then clicked a picture. When you close out of the
picture (clicking the X) the site gets into a weird non-functional state.
Clicking a second picture removes the list of pictures, but doesn't bring up a
new one. I'm on Safari 7.0.5, but this happens in Chrome as well.

The weird thing about this is that other trips don't seem to have that
problem. I did notice that other trips load the comments box beside the
picture, but this particular one doesn't. Very strange!

~~~
teddiekgb
thanks Mister_Snuggles for pointing that one out. I have never seen what you
described and will be sure to try to reproduce it asap.

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SteSteSte
1) The Url isn't exactly memorable.

2) I am able to traverse your directories eg
[http://itripd.com/js/](http://itripd.com/js/)

I don't know about apache so was unable to find a web config kinda file

3) I tried some sql injection and got this response "The URI you submitted has
disallowed characters."

I assume you are doing this manually rather than using sql parameters?

4) Inline CSS...yuck

5) Links like this [http://itripd.com/trip/4](http://itripd.com/trip/4) arn't
very friendly.

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nsetu
The site seems functional and simple - which is good I suppose.

I like to check places to visit,shop,eat,drink based on cities.

Just few suggestions though, 1) It needs proper search feature. 2) Its going
to be loaded with lots of blogs probably on same city? So, how would you
handle that? For Eg: If I search for say 'Dubai' then if I got more than one
results how can I filter this out. 3) It would be nice if I could navigate
based on categories on map. Like 'eat','drink','shop' etc

Otherwise, well done! Looks good to me.. :)

------
ahulak
Very cool site, I can see this being pretty darn interesting. Things I would
like to see (but I am only one person!)

1\. Mobile interface (I hate to be that guy, but this would be awesome as a
native app for those travelers) 2\. Widgetized! Most travel bloggers want this
on their own site. 3\. Ability to map out a journey (as opposed to placing
destinations on a map). I think a lot of travelers really take pride in the
route they take and how they get from place to place (eg a motorcycle ride
down the coast of Vietnam, or a boat ride across the mediterranean, etc)

------
waterside81
A monetization strategy for you: Try to associate any mentions of hotels, day
trips, activities etc. with a link to viator/hotels.com etc. and get the
referral fee.

If I was doing an idea like this, I think I would have gone mobile first
(perhaps you're thinking to go that way anyway?) That way you can tap into
people's geo location right away, easily associate photos & videos with the
location, people can log their thoughts/feelings with a quick note, and
perhaps purposely limit it to 140 to make it tweetable.

------
mlew42
You might check out [http://aprilzero.com/journal/making-of-
aprilzero/](http://aprilzero.com/journal/making-of-aprilzero/) for inspiration

------
yitchelle
Great idea! Some feedback from me.

1) When I type in the city name in the search box, I can hit return to make
selection, I have to click on the city in the drop down menu.

2) missing search box on the front page.

3)I type in France, and it says nothing matched my search. I would have
expected that Paris would be shown.

4) I like that you are using OpenStreetMap instead of Google's or Microsoft's
map products.

~~~
teddiekgb
hi yitchelle, the search feature needs to be improved. One big problem with
search eature is that it can only be so useful to he user if there is not much
content to display in the results. That is the reason i left if off the
homepage to begin with. Once we have more content im sure a nice big search
bar will find its way on to the homepage :)

------
sdernley
Looks really good. I might be missing it, but i think it would be a good idea
to have a filter (or search) for region on the main page. I might not be
interested in travel in general, but interesting in visiting a particular
region so only want to see stories from that area. Just an idea, but i think
it will help you lose less people if they land on the site looking for
something more specific.

Hope it works out for you!

------
chatmasta
It would be really cool if I could embed/share a widget on my blog that
includes all the functionality from your trip pages (e.g.
[http://itripd.com/trip/3](http://itripd.com/trip/3)). Give people an easy way
to upload photos and locations on your site, then output a code they can embed
on their blog as a "where I've been" section.

------
chrisseaton
I typed 'London' in the search box, selected the obvious result it gave me,
but then it took me to a page that says "No trips found featuring , ".

Also, do you specifically disable selecting and copying text? I can't seem to
do it in Safari. I found out when I tried to copy that error message, so the
direct impact on you is people are dissuaded from sending you error messages!

~~~
teddiekgb
thanks chrisseaton for pointing out that bug i will add it straight to the
list... should be an easy one to fix

------
13throwaway
You entire site needs to be available only over https. Otherwise login cookies
and passwords can be stolen.

How to setup a free SSL certificate on apache.
[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-
set-...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-
apache-with-a-free-signed-ssl-certificate-on-a-vps)

------
corywright
I'd like to see is for the search drop-down to list locations that aren't
already in the trip database. This way it prevents people from misspelling
locations when they are the first person to add it to the site.

Edit to add: Also, please allow setting a username so the profile URL is
meaningful (and pretty).

Edit again to remove unnecessary feature request.

------
LBarret
I thought of something similar, but focused on a team composed of a senior who
cannot move and plays the role of HQ (search & intel), and a adult who take
photos/videos/etc following the guidance of the HQ. It would provide an
interesting exchange : the senior feels like s/he is travelling, the adult
gets backup and better level of info.

~~~
rcarrigan87
Did you actually build this? Please post link if so!

------
skellystudios
I love the map interface – especially how you show pictures and group close
ones at high zoom levels.

It'd be nice if you gave us the ability to zoom in and out of our own free
will. I managed to double-click zoom a bunch of times and it took me ages to
get back out of a small village on the coast of Italy.

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draker
I have a recommendation though don't want to share publicly as it's
competitively sensitive. Contact me (email in profile) when you have a chance.

Edit: John, your server is rejecting my reply to your email. Check your
settings or contact using a different email.

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lukasm
Very cool. You may want to simplify on-boarding users e.g. bio can be added
later. I'd like it to tell me a story in a chronological order with some rough
costs (animation would be great of travel to next places)

~~~
teddiekgb
Thanks lukasm, I will be looking at improving the on-boarding of users very
soon. I agree that an empty profile isn't the most enticing sight for a new
user.

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jnardiello
As a random user, i really like both idea and execution. The website looks
good, the ux is simple and straight-forward. Everything is exactly as i
expected it, which is a good thing.

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nirajd
I see quite a few images from shutterstock. How do you expect the beauty of
this site and the images posted by users to scale?

~~~
teddiekgb
A good point nirajd. We hope that travel bloggers who are fighting to generate
more views for their trips will generally choose to upload interesting and
attractive photos in order to stand out from their competitors. But of course
being a site with 100% user generated content (travel bloggers or non travel
bloggers) we expect to see a diverse range of quality.

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psychboo
A purely cosmetic criticism - the logo looks almost exactly the same as the
tumblr logo.

~~~
notjustanymike
Down to the period at the end. I think that may be more than a coincidence.

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trbvm
Doesn't work with java-script and cookies disabled. Just a big picture and
then blank space.

