Show HN: Villagers – A group travel app

Show HN: Villagers – A group travel app(villagersapp.com)

64 points by bjpless 3 years ago | 52 comments

I've built Villagers, a group travel app, in an attempt to overcome my own social isolation while working remotely, especially as someone who's friends are now largely parents and much less available for group travel.

I find small group travel magical from an interpersonal and experience standpoint but organizing trips is absolutely brutal. With Villagers, I wanted to see if software could overcome some of those planning challenges with financial incentives, social features, and automation -- especially around messaging.

I love climbing, so I've built a trip to co-work and climb in Red Rocks (Nevada) in November.

https://villagersapp.com/t/gkkfv

I'm looking for 4-8 high EQ tech folks who'd like to co-work and climb. Everyone's identity will be verified and I'll make sure it's a broad culture fit (i.e. polite, respectful, reasonably extroverted, etc.). We'll keep the costs down to less than $500 per person for 3 nights.

For more social proof before you join me on a trip, you can click through my profile on the trip page above to see my LinkedIn work history as an early engineer at Plaid and most recently the founder of a 70+ person company (Tremendous).

mosselman 3 years ago |

I think you should change your demo trip, I clicked on it and got annoyed about how pedantic (for lack of a better word I can think of) the 'rules' were:

  Trip Rules
  No pets
  No parties
  Quiet after 11pm
  Alcohol allowed
  No drugs
  No marijuana allowed

I mean it is realistic for a yoga trip, but in a demo you'd want to showcase the most fun way to use this, not the most patronising way.

molsongolden 3 years ago | |

Interesting. I’m a totally different persona over here as those rules are appealing. If a trip is focused on co-working and climbing then I’d prefer to keep it mellow, get some sleep, get up early, etc.

jcpst 3 years ago | | |

I think the parent post is making the point that “less is more” here. The app could be used by all sorts of groups.

lastofthemojito 3 years ago |

I'm always fascinated by group travel apps although I certainly haven't seen a successful uber-app for managing all aspects of a trip.

I like the focus here on getting commitment from participants. That can be so challenging when putting together a trip.

It doesn't look like Villagers handles everything (and that's ok!) - e.g. when I went to create a new trip I noticed it looks like everything is based on having a single location - you can't set up lodging in location A for the beginning of a trip, have a few days on the trail hiking, and the lodging for the end of trip in location B (unless I missed it).

EDIT: Oh, and it looks like the lodging HAS to be an AirBNB (the field validates that the AirBNB URL contains AirBNB.com). That's certainly limiting.

bjpless 3 years ago | |

Yes, I'm really focused on the commitment mechanism -- Kickstarter for group travel effectively.

I had thought that was already eliminated so thanks for pointing that out! I just pushed a fix to remove the AirBnb requirement.

As for more complex itineraries, certainly want to tackle that in the future...

lastofthemojito 3 years ago | | |

> Yes, I'm really focused on the commitment mechanism

I think that's smart. Honestly, the UI is nice and all, but I don't think that's the killer feature. The great thing here is that folks don't want to be an asshole to friends/family/coworkers. They don't want to nag about getting commitments or on-time payments. They don't want to be a jerk about not giving money back if someone bails the night before a trip, or whatever. But Villagers can be the asshole (in a good way!) and enforce the agreed-upon terms so the trip planner doesn't have to.

profstasiak 3 years ago |

What is your opinion on [0] ?

I disagree with him about " My best guess is that a truly great consumer service needs to be something that is can be used every day. " I use Wanderlog (YC19) almost every trip I do, a lot of my friends after I recommended this tool started using it. Yet it is kinda right - Wanderlog doesn't seem to be making big progress, although pandemic is probably responsible for that

[0] https://blog.garrytan.com/travel-planning-software-the-most-...

bjpless 3 years ago | |

This is a great and valid question along with a helpful citation. Here are some counterpoints:

1) I would argue that that perspective misses a number of travel consumer apps like AirBnB.

2) I've bootstrapped this business and, while I do think that it could eventually morph into a regularly engaging social network or a tool for professional trip leaders (who would invalidate the limited usage point as power users), a healthy lifestyle business outcome would be reasonably ok (if not desirable) by me personally. I don't believe that I could have bootstrapped this company in 2012 (the date of that article) given the startup ecosystem and, frankly, this is a passion project after having previously worked at and founded SaaS fintech companies.

3) I do expect group travel to grow a ton over the next few years if people continue to work remotely. The evidence of mass social alienation is clear and folks have previously unheard of flexibility to travel.

solumos 3 years ago | | |

1) AirBNB is an accommodations marketplace, not a travel planning app. He's very specifically talking about travel planning apps. It's pretty difficult to monetize travel planning or travel discovery — you've basically got to be 10x better than Google Docs/Sheets and Instagram (respectively). And that's only considering product functionality. Pricing and monetization is a whole other conversation. It's really hard to build something big when all of the OTAs + AirBNB are already controlling most of the available supply.

2) It most likely won't lead to a successful social network because people mostly think about travel a handful of times per year. That was one of my tough learnings while working on Sherpa[0]. It could be a useful tool though! Maybe there's a solid B2B angle. Bootstrapping is also very smart. We tried to raise VC for Sherpa and ran out of runway.

3) I think you're right. There's probably something interesting there!

[0] - https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/02/sherpa-turns-instagrams-be...

bberenberg 3 years ago | | |

To add, this specific area of group travel is getting VC money now. See https://trovatrip.com/

molsongolden 3 years ago | |

I had a similar initial reaction but thought about it more and could see Villagers as something different from a classic "travel planning app" due to the combo of 1) recent remote/hybrid work explosion and 2) public or semi-public trip discovery (maybe my trip isn't publicly searchable but I can ask friends to circulate the link to their friends)

5560675260 3 years ago |

Link to demo page hijacked my "back" button, not a fan.

codalan 3 years ago | |

Not a fan of the modal popup that seems to force you to either click "Continue" or "Not Interested". You can't ESC it away and it completely blocks out all the relevant info about the trip.

How do I know if I'm interested or not if I can't even read your own description on the page and make a decision?

hairofadog 3 years ago | | |

I worked with a guy once who implemented a popup asking for feedback on the website. By a huge margin the number one piece of feedback was "I don't like this popup", but he considered that to be an extraneous data point, threw it out of the results, and just kept on popping.

bjpless 3 years ago | | |

I completely understand this objection. Ultimately, this was a tough trade off that I made for reasons that I can elaborate on at a different point.

In most cases, the goal is to have an organizer create a quick video describing the trip to communicate enough info for you to then declare your preferences. Here is an example:

https://villagersapp.com/t/gkkfv

Either way, I just pushed a change to make the modal escapable.

bjpless 3 years ago |

On a related note, I'm willing to personally act as a travel agent for a remote co-working trip among coworkers as a non-scaleable way to grow the platform initially and get user feedback. If you're interested in exploring in a fun 4-10 person trip with colleagues, email me at ben@villagersapp.com.

abadger9 3 years ago |

This is a problem as old as time. Over a decade ago I saw startups from Stanford trying to tackle this. This is not an expert perspective, but I believe the market is too small to really make it worth while. As alluded to, people in their 30s/40s lean into their family, children's activities etc.

bjpless 3 years ago | |

I'll just reiterate what I said below which is that, while I think you point of view has a lot of merit, there are compelling "Why Now" counterpoints that I think you're undervaluing. Only time will tell though!

tkk23 3 years ago | |

It doesn't have to be worth while. Travel planning is a special case that can be used to hone the tool. Later-on it can be used to plan things that make money, like startups.

laputan_machine 3 years ago |

> Alcohol allowed

> No drugs

???

> with verified identities (license or passport).

Also, hope you've thought through storing personal info like passports and driving licences mate. Not just for GDPR, but if you don't have liability insurance and a good legal team you are asking for trouble. Hope you don't get any data breaches!

bjpless 3 years ago | |

I use vendors rather than storing myself. Tokenization only :)

kryptonite 3 years ago |

I'd love to be able to see other peoples' past trip itineraries to get ideas about what things I might want to add to my own itinerary and how to structure it.

sdeep27 3 years ago |

just wanted to say - this is well designed, clean interface, and fast (on my desktop). Well done, especially if you solo developed this.

bjpless 3 years ago | |

Yes it is solo developed and I sincerely appreciate that!

jcpst 3 years ago |

This is always an interesting app idea to me, but after trying group trips few ways with people, the most successful have been loosely coupled:

Pick a geographical location. Pick some dates that overlap. Plan your own trip. Keep things decoupled.

Then, just find times that you want to meet up. Just like regular life.

For things that require coordination, like a camping/canoe trip, email works well.

ttoinou 3 years ago |

Cool, there is def some things to do with nomad trips. Thinking of working online + doing an activity altogether like Kitesurfing, skiing, scuba diving, freediving, paragliding etc.

bjpless 3 years ago | |

I love surfing and skiing so should be planning those too. See my email that I’ve included a bunch in this thread and I’ll add you to a “village”

samhuk 3 years ago |

Kudos on the site design; fast, responsive, clean. Are you able to you tell us about your stack?

Am I right in thinking that it's essentially Facebook Events but traveling?

bjpless 3 years ago | |

Thank you, that’s really generous of you. It’s a dead simple stack — which is helpful as a solo founder — of rails as an API and react. I make liberal use of other saasy services.

It’s more complex than Facebook events in that there are fintech (payment) mechanisms built in. I’d describe it as Kickstarter meets FB events but with a focus on travel UX requirements

samhuk 3 years ago | | |

I wonder if Facebook never integrated payments because of the inevitability of scammers setting up fake events to extract down-payments, Fyre Festival style.

Out of curiosity, how does Villagers prevent Fyre Festival-like events?

jph 3 years ago |

Interesting idea. When I tap "Plan A Trip", the box color highlights, but nothing happens, and I don't see a way to get beyond that page.

bjpless 3 years ago | |

Interesting, I'll check that out. It's presumably a javascript error that I can't reproduce but here is the direct link to plan a trip:

https://villagersapp.com/app/trips/new/edit

bake 3 years ago |

Neat! The mix of (a) planning trips for groups of friends and (b) opening up trips to folks you don't know is nice.

enos_feedler 3 years ago | |

Yes i think this is interesting because there are people who like to plan trips and people who just want to go on them. My parents just fwd me an itinerary for 2 weeks in Scotland. One of their friends loves to plan it. The enthusiasm comes across in the email she fwd me. So it’s interesting that this platform could be almost like a creator platform for those who like to plan trips. Would be super cool to be able to reserve blocks of flights, rooms, tickets etc in advance to be able to confirm the price up front. If guests could simply tap to join and have everything booked and paid for would be cool. Especially would be good now for 3 or 4 day weekend trips for remote workers

oliv__ 3 years ago |

I don't really like climbing but this app looks fun. Would be especially interested in trips with other founders

bjpless 3 years ago | |

Yes for sure. Email me at ben@villagersapp.com and I’ll add you to an internal list of founders

mallocs13 3 years ago |

I live in Vegas (technically Henderson) and I'd love to join for the climbing.

bjpless 3 years ago | |

Ben@villagersapp.com, reach out!

bjpless 3 years ago |

Any other locations / dates that I could propose that would interest folks?

hasbot 3 years ago | |

November climbing in the New River Gorge.

November mountain biking in Asheville/Brevard NC.

November road biking in Brevard/Hendersonville NC.

weakfish 3 years ago | | |

Yay for NC representation!

molsongolden 3 years ago | |

Can't make the Nov dates but definitely interested in future climbing/co-working. Made an account and sent a friend request + pinged on LinkedIn.

yboris 3 years ago |

My favorite tool for coordinating locations with people is What 3 Words

https://what3words.com/

The map of the world is split into 3x3 meter squares with a unique three-word ID for each, e.g: twig.fleet.likely

makestuff 3 years ago |

looks awesome! I have also been working on a similar app in my free time. Looks like several people had this idea during covid since we all miss that in person interaction.

bjpless 3 years ago | |

Founder here, let me know if you'd like to chat about working together!

thih9 3 years ago |

Why does the start date have to be at least 10 days in advance?

bjpless 3 years ago | |

It’s really just a fraud concern in the short term if money is involved but definitely planning to change that

renewiltord 3 years ago |

Good luck! Sounds like fun!