We're pretty excited to be the first YC company to launch following the big funding announcement. It will be interesting to see if it affects the amount of attention we get from the launch.
It was a long term honeymoon - we gave up our flat in Brighton and just set off into the world with just our backpacks and laptops. We were also ill in Casablanca (and it was Ramadan so couldn't find any restaurants open) so we rented a flat for two weeks to cook for ourselves and built and launched the first version of Lanyrd.
Congrats on the site, didn't realise until now it was yc.
Out of curiosity (I was considering the same) where else did you travel to?. Being that my principle goals are to do a round the world trip and finish my startup, I figured the best way would be for me to do them both at the same time.
We spent six months travelling, starting in Europe (a proper honeymoon in Corsica, then through France and Spain) and then moving to North Africa: Morocco and Egypt.
We were travelling slowly - almost all overland without flying, and in no hurry to leave somewhere if we liked it. We ended up spending 7 weeks in Morocco because we were enjoying it so much (the original plan was just 2-3 weeks).
We would have kept going, but since the site was taking off we applied for YC from Egypt and ended up having to fly from Cairo to San Francisco for the interview - then back to Johannesburg for a pre-arranged road trip with friends.
Working on a startup while travelling actually worked surprisingly well for us. The two require different parts of your brain - startuping is very creative, while travel is very reactive. We'd go out and explore Marrakech for a few hours, talk about Lanyrd stuff, then head back to the Riad for a few hours to build things. It was actually pretty productive!
Hacking while travelling can be quite limiting though - you're carting around a lot of expensive gear, which makes some destinations / some cheap accommodation less of a good idea. We decided to put off our planned trip to Mali for a while for example.
I'm pretty glad we got out of Egypt before they turned off the internet though!
Congratulations! As someone who lives in a country where conferences are quite rare and scarcely publicized a tool like lanyrd (increasingly used here(italy)) helps really a lot.
Started on a honeymoon. Great story. They say a co-founder is like a spouse and a startup is like a marriage, but you two are bringing it to a whole new level.
You've done a really great job with the site. Three things:
1) I reaaally hate the yellow buttons. Surely you can code or find some images that look better. :)
2) I'd love to be able to follow/track a person and the events s/he is arranging.
3) I'd also be interested to track events by some other measure - topic or location perhaps. A lot of things don't happen in my country outside the US, so I'd love to be able to monitor events in the capital without using RSS.
All in all a great job - there have been people before you to think of this, but none of them have made a site that was genuinely interesting and useful.
2) You can track a person's events by following them on Twitter - at the moment the Lanyrd social graph and the Twitter graph are the same thing. We're going to add "follow" buttons on Lanyrd to make it easier to follow someone without having to go to Twitter to do it.
3) That's definitely coming. For the moment, you can use our RSS feeds for that (on the place pages, topic pages and even the topic-in-place pages) but it won't be an RSS-only feature forever.
We're not really in the social-network-for-your-event market, though some of our functionality might address part of that problem space. Services like EventVue are limited in terms of growth because they need to convince conferences to sign up (and pay for the service) one at a time - it's a sales problem.
With Lanyrd, the event itself doesn't need to have anything to do with the site for a profile to be created - and the more events we have listed, the more valuable the service is to our users. We have over 5,000 events listed already, all entered by our community.
Thanks to Start Fund, we've got a healthy runway to figure out our business model. We have a bunch of options and we're confident we can find something that works for us.
