Ask HN: My strange pain point – is it a startup idea?

11 points by get 8 years ago | 32 comments

I travel pretty often. I'm not exactly a digital nomad but I like to stay in cities around in other cities and do whatever I would have done at home otherwise. Mostly working on web projects.

And it's insane, how much time I spent on AirBnB and Booking.com, looking for the right apartments. Hours and hours of work that could be replaced with a simple database query if they had structured data. But even without, it could be made much easier with the right interface.

Two of my requirements make it so hard:

1) Top floor. I don't like people running 'on my head'.

2) A view. I don't like to look out of the window and stare at another house.

So I have to look at each offer on AirBnB and Booking.com and try to figure out if it matches those. This is hard enough. I even became super good at finding the apartments on Google Earth so I can look at them from the outside. Insane.

To add insult to injury, neither of the two sites offer to tag apartments as "I don't like it". So when I look at the same city another day, I have to start over and look at all those apartments I already looked at again.

On AirBnB I abuse the 'Wishlist' feature to mark apartments as 'Dont like it'. So my 'wishlists' are really 'dont wish lists'. But at least it somewhat works. They mark apartments on one of your wishlists with a heart. So I know that the apartments with a heart are those that I don't like :) Since they only allow 50 or so apartments on a wishlist, I have multiple wishlists for every city.

Realizing how much time I spend on this, I am considering to hire somebody for it. So I will have a database with apartments with a view.

What do you guys think? Should I then put it online? Like 'Nomad list with a view'? Or am I a unique snowflake? Or does something like this already exist?

dirktheman 8 years ago |

I used to work in the travel industry. You wouldn't believe the explicit wishes/demands of people: bed size, shower type, hard floors, no stairs, fridge, no yellow lights (really), double ply TP, south facing windows, vincinity of freeway exit, you name it.

The thing is: there's an infinite number of data you'd have to gather. I feel your pain (we need a children's cot and that alone is almost impossible to filter with AirBnB) but it'll be really hard.

get 8 years ago | |

This is a misunderstanding. I would not gather data about bed size or shower type. All I want to do is assemble a list of top floor apartments with a view.

timdavila 8 years ago | | |

Those are your requirements.

Dirk is saying yours is one of a long list of very specific requirements people have requested in the past. You asked about a startup idea, so he is generalizing the problem to make it applicable for more users than just yourself, and pointing out how complicated it would be.

_wmd 8 years ago |

I feel your pain. I've been travelling for the past 6 months, and have become the world's foremost critic of booking.com's UI in that time. That site, despite dominating the entire planet when it comes to such things, has no option to select [x] I REQUIRE A DESK TO WORK FROM

It's unbelievable how far gone these sites are from scenarios like yours and mine, and it'd be so easy to fix up.

Or they lack any understanding of the areas they market. I'm currently in Kathmandu, can I filter hotels by those that have a heater and hot running water? Of course not, but sure, I can filter by 100 options like "Airport shuttle", "24/7 front desk", and differentiate between a "hostel" and a "lodge", or whether the room has "soundproofing", 99% of these of which every hotel will tick yes to.

Another pain point -- WiFi. There are 100 ways they could measure this, but not a single one implemented, even a sliding "how shit was your connection? during the review, or, say, a surreptitious "How was your check-in?" e-mail that runs a miniature JS speed test in the background

Another travelling scenario - short term contracts around London. I don't care where I sleep, I care about rail and bus routes _only_. Can I search by that on any site? Of course not

Meanwhile I actually built a niche site around that last one, but it can't stand on its own -- it'd never become popular or turn any kind of profit, the only hope is that a big site with roaring revenues like Booking.com would somehow see the need, and spend a few working days worth of developer time on it. But that'll never happen, because the improvement to their bottom line would most probably be minimal -- I'll still use booking.com whether or not they implement the feature, because there are so view viable alternatives in this sector

get 8 years ago | |

Would love to see your site. If you want to get in touch - I have put my email on my profile.

zapperdapper 8 years ago |

I hear you - I've often wanted a feature to reject apartments/hotels without an outdoor pool (don't like indoor pools).

The trouble is building a database is going to be a huge project and "view" is a little subjective. Wouldn't you have to basically replicate AirBnB's database but with a better interface? You would probably end up doing something like web crawling TripAdvisor or something like that (which is against their policies by the way).

Or is the plan to allow people to build their own personal lists from Booking.com, TripAdvisor, AirBnB etc.? - if the latter I think that is a good idea, but ultimately you've still got to find those apartments so you run into the original problem again.

p.s. writing this from 32 floor apartment with a spectacular view out over Manila. Not top floor but I've heard nothing at all from above me! (Booked via AirBnB)

get 8 years ago | |

My 'plan' is very simple. It's just a list of links for each city. No community features or anything. Just the links to apartments that I myself found. Features could be added later. But the initial idea is to just put a list of links online. Probably with a line 'If you know about an apartment with a great view you want to share, please send it to ...@...'.

If you like, let me know which apartment it is in Manila and I will happily add it :)

zapperdapper 8 years ago | | |

Great idea then!

Twin Oaks Place, Manila. View from 32nd floor out over Manila is incredible especially at night. There are even distant mountains you can see once the smog clears in the morning! ;)

Joona 8 years ago |

For tagging apartments as "I don't like it", you could create a browser extension that automatically hides them. That aside, I think dirktheman's comment is relevant; I don't think the data you want is useful for most other users.

get 8 years ago | |

I never use browser extensions because of the security and privacy problems.

When you say 'most other users' - can you quantify that? If for example 99% of the world population does not care, that would still leave me with 76 million people who do care.

jaredsohn 8 years ago | | |

If you build it yourself for yourself, you should be able to have some confidence re: security and privacy.

irremediable 8 years ago |

Probably too small a demand.

The general problem is property search with lots of options, and even that is a tricky niche... I worked at a company that tried to do this, and in the end we found it's too much work per niche.

Maybe if NLP gets a lot better.

get 8 years ago | |

Can you quantify the small demand somehow?

Is an apartment with a view not something many people want?

When I look at r/digitalnomad, the top post right now is somebody showing of the view of their apartment.

Booking.com has a filter 'View'. So there must be some demand, right? The filter just does not work. When I look at apartments with a view in Bangkok the first 3 they show me are:

https://www.booking.com/hotel/th/bangkokshortstay-3br-sukhum...

https://www.booking.com/hotel/th/aspira-parc-39.html

https://www.booking.com/hotel/th/ekkamai-prestige.html

None of these are what I mean with an apartment with a view. Some are just hotel rooms. Some seem to not have a view.

irremediable 8 years ago | | |

Estimate how many people are searching for property at a given time, how many of them would use your view-focused site (a tiny fraction), how many of them would find something through it and hence give you income (probably referral bonus from whatever big property listers you're partnering with).

Now weigh that against the cost of creating/running a site, and digging out the properties with a view.

I've not done this rigorously at all. But in the site I worked on, I suspect people filtering by facets similar to "has a view" were, optimistically, about 1% of our engaged audience. Conversion rates were like 5%. So that was probably a few tens of people per day (we had a fairly big audience!)

If you monetise by referral bonuses, you'll probably get tens of dollars per referral. So at most ~100USD per day.

Now consider the costs of setting up and running such a site. Remember that we were a global property search engine -- to get that thousands-strong audience, we were running all over the world.

IMO it just doesn't add up.

You can always prove me wrong! One way might be to focus on high-end clients, and somehow make more money from them... larger referral bonuses, for example, or having the clients pay you to find them properties with a good view.

But yeah, I remain sceptical.

DoreenMichele 8 years ago |

I will suggest that people who want it with a view may be a small number, but probably a well heeled group. That absolutely does not make the radar of people on a budget. So if you build it, you might be able to charge a membership fee.

hodl 8 years ago |

Practical problem is how do you get hosts to provide all this extra info and trust them to be honest and accurate.

I can't even search for real estate and specify houses without getting apartments or vice versa

get 8 years ago | |

I would just do what I already do. Look carefully at each apartment to see if it could have a nice view. I judge it by the photos, the description, customer reviews and Google street view.

Only apartments that might have a nice view go into my list.

I wonder if anybody else is interested in that list and if it would make an interesting website.

sharemywin 8 years ago |

a place where people could build sql queries and save them for others.

Maybe you could use:

http://commoncrawl.org

I kinda remember a site that saves html in tables to be queried.

NumberCruncher 8 years ago |

What about sendin an automated massage to the landlord like "top floor with nice view?". What about not giving a fuck about such unimportant things and spending your time more wisely? I mean if I want to live every month in a different accommodation I can not expect having the same comfort than in my dream flat. It's like expecting that the food at a restaurant tastes like being cooked by my mother.

gallerdude 8 years ago |

I don't think there's a huge audience for this.