Ask HN: My side project. Is it useful?
About 3 years ago, I started work on FlightM8. For reasons that I'll simply refer to as "life falling apart" I stopped working on it. However, seeing Google Flights launch yesterday re-piqued my interest in it and I'm wondering wether I should pick it up again. So what is FlightM8?
Firstly, it's an Alpha. The data is out of date, and it's buggy. It's also on shared hosting so it may well buckle under pressure at the moment.
Here's the URL for the impatient: http://flightm8.tomelders.com/
Secondly: Here's what it does...
In a nutshell, FlightM8 tells you "who flies where". Let's say you're in London. Your boss calls and says you have to meet with Diesel Jeans on Monday. They're a big new client and they're in Bassano Del Grappa, Italy. The rest is up to you to figure out. So... How do you get from London to Bassano Del Grappa?
Well, London is pretty easy for anyone who knows it. You have Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, Stanstead, London City airports to choose from.
Bassano del Grappa?, not so easy. First of all, where the hell is it? When you eventually find it, you realise it doesn't have an airport. Here's where FlightM8 starts being useful. Search for Bassano del Grappa and you'll see that it's served by 3 airports, all within a reasonable distance. Venice Marco Polo, Venice Treviso, Verona Villa Franca.
There's not a flight search engine that I know of that would group those airports together.
Ok, so who flies to those places? This is what flightm8 was built to do. For a combination of routes you have a choice of... Ryanair, Easyjet, Air Berlin, Germanwings, British Airways, Monarch Airlines and BMI.
I'm willing to gamble you've never heard of at least two of those airlines. And two of those airlines (Easyjet, Ryanair) do not show up on flight search websites. (A quick aside, there used to be a bunch of other budget airlines in Europe that you've probably never heard of, but a lot of them went bust in the recession)
The aim is to help you 'start' your search for flights. I started work on it out of necessity because I was flying all over europe and wasting a lot of money on flights, only to be told by a local that I could have flown to an airport I've never heard of, with an airline I've never heard of for half the money.
When I heard Google had bought IATA, I secretly hoped they'd release some sort of API. I doubt that's going to happen, which makes listing prices and times of flight near impossible in terms of cost.
But here's the question: Is FlightM8 useful? Should I resume working on it?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2011 where @tomelders convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
Quick criticism. Please take it as points to improve:
The UI is too complicated and confusing. I can't get my head around it. Can you simplify it?
Zooming in and out of the map with the mouse wheel doesn't work.
Too many error messages. Instead of saying "you didn't pick any destination", ask me to pick one from a list or predictive textbox.
Don't show me destinations to which there are no routes. Spending five minutes clicking around to get an error message in the end is no fun.
Don't separate the to and from locations so much visually. Tabs don't feel right for that kind of thing. Anyway, it's just two fields, just show them together.
You didn't completely carry through the concept of going from place to place, rather than airport to airport. When I search for Paris as my destination, you show me a dot on Paris the city, and couple of dots for the airports. My instinct is to click on the dot for the city, not the airports. Let me select the dot for the city.
You could make this really intuitive by getting rid of the text boxes entirely. Let me just click on the map to do everything. Click to select both start and end locations.
Nice tool, good design, UX could be improved, but I like the idea.
``` There's not a flight search engine that I know of that would group those airports together.
``` Not really, I always use the map feature on SkyScanner, you can see and choose a nearby airport, and you can also check if a direct flight is available. If there's one thing where your tool is different, is that you can type the name of a random place, but I find hard to believe that people would be so clueless about the place they're going to.
``` And two of those airlines (Easyjet, Ryanair) do not show up on flight search websites
``` Again, SkyScanner does that, and so does a number of other flight search engines or travel sites such as Expedia, eDreams, lastminute etc. This is simply untrue.
Overall, good job, I don't see why people wouldn't want to use this.
p.s: Should you land in Verona Villafranca, come say hi! I live near there :)
Great idea, I think it could be really useful.
I'd like it even more if you decrease the focus on the giant map and instead have a little form like
``` +--------------------------------+ | Leaving from: ______________ | | | | Going to: ______________ | | | | [Show me] | +--------------------------------+
``` Let me put in, for example, Vancouver, Canada and New York City
Show me a mini map for my end points and let the rest of the screen show what flights I can take. Maybe with some controls to let me filter on things like "what car rental my company uses", "time on train from airport to city center".
Let me pick specific airports... but don't force me to.
I'm generally pretty optimistic but I feel that I should push back against the crowd a little here. Plenty of people say "I'd use it", but who will say "I'll pay for it"?
If you're not in it for the money, are you sure it's the most interesting, inspiring or needed tool/app you could be working on, given that it seems the competition may take care of this need anyway?
I've learnt the hard way that you shouldn't let sunk costs of a project sway your decision to carry on with it.
All the best whatever you decide.
I think what you've got is pretty cool, but you've got some extremely stiff competition from the likes of Hipmunk, and (as of yesterday) Google: google.com/flights.
I also worry that your unique selling point (the fact that it helps to display hard-to-find airports) is difficult to word in an appealing way - who wants to go to hard-to-find airports? I'm not saying it's impossible though, but I think you'd benefit from finding a good way to word that. Good luck!