Congrats on the launch! You have a great start to a tough problem. I've been running a collaborative travel planning and booking platform for over two years – it's an exciting space and there's still a lot of opportunity in the multi-person planning space.
Some feedback on the product:
1. Collaborative features seem a little buggy. I registered and then shared the trip with myself in an incognito window. It was easy to trip up the document sync – try to make an edit in incognito and then make an edit to the same element in the registered window and the document gets out sync.
2. Input validation needed for links. I entered an incomplete link (google.com) and it treated it like a relative link, which broke the trip.
3. Is it possible to scope searches? I searched for hotels in a city and the initial results seemed centered on my destination but the rest of the list was from other cities or states.
4. Default map zoom is inconsistent. I started adding locations but all of the pins were on top of each other at the initial zoom level. Managing zoom level as the itinerary fills out will help keep the trip in perspective.
5. I could see edits made in different windows, but was unable to see who was online? Is that part of the UI and I missed it?
Some business feedback (for what it's worth) – figure out a monetization strategy fast. There are a lot of planners in the travel space but not a lot of booking solutions for groups. Affiliate links are okay but still leave a lot of money on the table. I'd be happy to talk about what has worked for us if you're interested – email is in profile. For those interested, my company launched https://www.lunamoons.com as a B2C collaborative planner but we recently pivoted to a full service platform (think squarespace for travel agents) which is live at https://www.trips.app. We tout our trips as google docs for itineraries, but maybe less doc like (i.e. https://sample.trips.app/sample-itinerary/rapid-flower-8635/...)
I just added search scoping based on the current map viewport; thanks for the suggestion! I've been meaning to do this for a while.
> 4. Default map zoom is inconsistent.
I also just pushed a fix that zooms in if the newly-created marker is too close to another one. Take a look and see if it works!
The other issues will take a bit longer, but they're all definitely real:
1. We have issues with editors editing text at the same time, and this is an ongoing limitation of how we're using ShareDB on the back-end. We'll do our best to make it better
5. We definitely should add bubbles to show who else is editing for sure! You're not missing anything -- we really need to do this
On the overall business feedback part, it's definitely tough. We've had some success with affiliate ads for our other sites, but otherwise, B2B is a much easier market in many ways. We're going to build the best product we can, and keep costs low.
On the travel agents side, one name you've probably heard of is Travefy! (They similarly pivoted from a B2C to B2B) Take a look, and feel free to give me an email if you'd like to be introduced to a Travefy early-user travel agent to learn what she likes about it (peter@travelchime.com)
What kinds of limitations do you have with sharedb? How do you use it? I've recently started using it in a project and would like to know the limitations.
The travel agent market looks like an interesting one, and probably a much less saturated one than the B2C stuff.
For better and for worse I can't ever imagine a trip with friends where we plan itineraries in that much detail in advance, but on the other hand travel agencies are expected to generate something that looks exactly like the trip planner, and probably wish they could sometimes do it collaboratively over a period of time (my brother still tells the cringeworthy story about the travel agent trying to make itinerary suggestions in real time by quoting TripAdvisor reviews...)
Some feedback on the product:
1. Collaborative features seem a little buggy. I registered and then shared the trip with myself in an incognito window. It was easy to trip up the document sync – try to make an edit in incognito and then make an edit to the same element in the registered window and the document gets out sync.
2. Input validation needed for links. I entered an incomplete link (google.com) and it treated it like a relative link, which broke the trip.
3. Is it possible to scope searches? I searched for hotels in a city and the initial results seemed centered on my destination but the rest of the list was from other cities or states.
4. Default map zoom is inconsistent. I started adding locations but all of the pins were on top of each other at the initial zoom level. Managing zoom level as the itinerary fills out will help keep the trip in perspective.
5. I could see edits made in different windows, but was unable to see who was online? Is that part of the UI and I missed it?
Some business feedback (for what it's worth) – figure out a monetization strategy fast. There are a lot of planners in the travel space but not a lot of booking solutions for groups. Affiliate links are okay but still leave a lot of money on the table. I'd be happy to talk about what has worked for us if you're interested – email is in profile. For those interested, my company launched https://www.lunamoons.com as a B2C collaborative planner but we recently pivoted to a full service platform (think squarespace for travel agents) which is live at https://www.trips.app. We tout our trips as google docs for itineraries, but maybe less doc like (i.e. https://sample.trips.app/sample-itinerary/rapid-flower-8635/...)