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旅行规划软件：最常见的糟糕创业点子
Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
2014 — 2021，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
这篇 2012 年博文讨论为什么“旅行规划软件”是常见的糟糕创业点子：人们旅行和规划频率低，且历来不愿直接为规划付费，产品很难形成可持续生意。文章多年后仍反复登上 Hacker News，引发旅行创业者的亲身复盘与反驳。
为什么经久不衰：它用一个看似普通的产品类别，精准揭示频率、付费意愿和“比手动规划好 10 倍”的创业难点，至今仍是讨论消费级产品与创业选题的经典参照。
HN 评论精选
亲历者证实行程规划功能使用率极低，转向推荐才带来增长和退出。
我是旅行指南应用 TouristEye 的创始人。我们曾做过很漂亮的逐日行程规划功能，有 10 万多名用户在旅行中使用过，但真正使用它的人只有 5%，于是我们砍掉该功能，转向捕捉用户愿望并推荐行程内容，这带来了更多使用量、收入，也是公司最终被 Lonely Planet 收购的原因之一。行程规划作为生意确实很糟，但团队仍为它自豪。
fesja查看英文原文
I was the founder of TouristEye, a travel guide app that makes trip planning really easy. We got into 500Startups, we reached 500k registered travelers and then we sold the company to Lonely Planet, the leader of the sector. I see myself on this post. Several years ago we decided to build an amazing trip planning, that allowed you to plan your trip day-by-day. You can see some screenshots on the Chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/touristeye-planner/kpjpejalhlnocbhggpnokneghfenoneg) (not working now). We got over 100k users using it on their trips (not daily users obviously). It was gorgeous, people really loved it, Google really loved it, but the usage was pretty low. Just 5% of our users used it. So because we were a startup we decided to kill it and we focused on capturing user wishes, and recommending those things for their trips (kind of Google Now for trips and offline). That's what gave us more usage, more income and finally it was one of the reasons of our exit. So, yes. Trip planning sucks as a business. But all our team remembers it proudly. It was just fucking amazing :)
核心难点是付费意愿，而非低频；旅行规划历来没有直接付费市场。
问题不在于使用频率低：Zillow、Cars.com 也低频却赚钱。真正的问题是让消费者愿意付费。Kayak 每笔交易有佣金，商业模式天然成立；旅行规划网站却要用户额外付钱，而人们从未直接为旅行规划付费——过去旅行社的费用是隐形收取的。因此这类公司要么自己卖旅行产品抽佣，要么创造一个新市场。
qq66查看英文原文
The problem with travel planning isn't frequency of use: as other people have pointed out, Zillow and Cars.com are used infrequently but make money. The problem is generating a consumer willingness to pay. Kayak has a commission on every sale, so their business model is baked in. But a travel planning site will need to get customers to pay extra, in some way, and they're reluctant to do so. Travel planning is something that people have never paid for directly -- travel agents used to extract their fees invisibly -- so a travel planning company will either need to sell the travel themselves and collect commission like existing travel sites, or create a new market.
低频使获客和学习成本难以摊薄，用户尝鲜后容易流失。
普通上班族一年可能只规划一两次旅行。这正是问题所在：很多需求确实存在，但发生得太少，学习新方式的成本远高于继续用旧办法。很少有人愿意花一小时学新流程，去替代一年只花两小时的事。创业公司还可能直到扩张时才发现：痛点真实、方案不错、用户也用了一次，然后就彻底流失。
AndrewKemendo查看英文原文
How often do people really plan trips? For the typical working adult, probably once or twice a year if you're lucky. This is exactly why this doesn't work. There are tons of things that people do that need fixing, but they do them so rarely that the costs of adopting the new way of doing it are significant when compared to the cost of just doing it the old way. Said another way, very few people are going to take an hour to learn a new process which would otherwise only take two hours a year to do. edit: This also is a way that a start-up could go super wrong and not know it until they try to scale. Identified pain point, good solution, engaged users with a real problem use it once and then it drops off completely. Talk about frustrating!
Wanderlog 创始人反驳：好产品可被记住，人们享受规划，工具应适配旅行者。
我是 Wanderlog 的联合创始人，我们正是做旅行规划的 YC W19 公司。关于频率：我们低估了人的记忆能力，产品足够好用户就会记住。关于痛点：过去工具失败，是因为没有比 Google Sheets 好足够多；它们假定人们不喜欢规划或应按某种方式规划，试图省时自动化。其实人们热爱规划和分享旅行，工具应围绕旅行者，而不是规定他们怎么做。
phsource查看英文原文
Oh boy -- I'm the cofounder of Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com), a YC W19 startup exactly focused on planning travel. And I've really read all these articles This originally was big on Hacker News in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419658 This is really just the latest in a long list of articles about why travel planning startups aren't worth pursuing: - https://www.phocuswire.com/Why-you-should-never-consider-a-travel-planning-startup - https://paansm.medium.com/the-top-5-reasons-your-travel-startup-will-fail-e60c53e70ea8 But we're still at it and have grown a ton over the past year! - On frequency: I think we're underestimating folks' ability to remember here! If the product actually is good, people will remember it. - On being a real pain point: It's true that people have many "good enough" solutions to travel planning, but travel planning tools have failed because the past products really just haven’t been better by enough than using Google Sheets -- they assume that people don't like planning, or that they plan a certain way, and try to save time and automate it. In fact, people _love_ planning and sharing their trips! The tool just needs to work around the traveler, rather than dictate Still, it's instructive that none of the links in the 2014 post's comments work. Will we prove them wrong? We can check back in 3 years when this article comes back to the front page again xD
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