Show IH: Wings Flight Club - save hundreds on international flights
👋 Hey Indie Hackers. I've been lurking for the past few months here - really love the conversations happening here and the type of feedback people have.
I've been working on a side project for the past few months so I figured I'd share it with you all. It's called Wings Flight Club (https://wingsflightclub.com). The core premise is that we use software to track changes in flight prices and email our users when we find really cheap deals. We look at flight prices from NYC (soon launching in LA and SF 🎉) to 100+ destinations nightly. Here's a list of deals we've found recently: https://wingsflightclub.com/past_deals.
Would love to hear people's thoughts! We recently reworked our homepage, so any comments on positioning, value props, CTA's etc would be greatly appriciated.
I like the concept. Can save a lot of manual work. I sometimes use Kayak's alert feature but it's pretty basic.
Just signed up. I'll give it a try once you add Boston. Good luck!
Cool, thanks for signing up! we've got a good number of people in Boston on the waitlist, so definitely hoping to launch there soon.
I am a big fan of minimalist websites like this. One suggestion though: I don't think the <a> links should underline when hovered over...I think it makes it look kind of cheap when you could do something cool like change the color of the link or something. I'm just nit-picking, though because I like it in general :)
Good feedback, I see what you're saying. And thanks!
I've tried signing up but it looks like you're only targeting origin destinations in the USA. It would be helpful if the city selection form had an option for people outside of those cities/the US. That way you wouldn't lose potential customers and also find out which new cities had the most interest.
Good point. We probably won't open up origin cities outside the US for awhile, but gathering emails / information never hurts.
Adding an "other" box where people can type it in would probably solve this problem for the time being.
Yeah, as I do like the concept and would love to try it out, so an email when it's ready would be cool :)
Will work on that tonight and shoot you a link 👍
This is basically just scottscheapflights.com right? (no judgement, just making sure I'm not missing something important).
If so, I'd recommend you check out their landing page and emails for advice on CTAs, content, etc.
One thing I noticed (which I didn't like at all) was that only after registering did you tell me that the product isn't free at all, and I'm only getting a month's trial... That seems pretty sketchy and scottscheapflights.com handles this a lot better IMO :)
Good luck!
Thanks Louis, great feedback.
Totally agree that it's awkward we don't mention it's a paid product until we've already captured your email. I think we could easily fix this by renaming the CTA something like "start your free trial".
And yes, it's similar to SCF - we're huge fans of Scott. The big difference is our secret sauce - while scott employs an army of human flight finders that track down deals manually, we use software. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but here's what we think makes us standout:
Signal to noise: almost all of Scott's deals are sent to users in MANY origin cities, even when you pay for premium. This can be pretty noisy - sometimes he sends deals like "Flights to Berlin in the $300s!" but really it will only be $300 from Chicago, but $450 from NYC. We're a little more focused: we only send out deals to a users origin city, and only when that deal is really amazing for that specific route.
More granular itineraries: Scott's deals are usually for a broad swath of time (i.e Jan - Sept 2018), but in reality the prices for flights in that range will vary a lot week to week. This forces users to hunt through google flights to find the very best weeks. We take a bit more of an opinionated approach: all the deals we send are for a specific week when the deal is cheapest and are paired with a set of supplemental weeks a user could fly that are also very cheap. We link all of the itineraries directly to google flights or momondo so the user doesn't need to spend time sifting through search results to find the lowest price.
Quality over quantity: we automatically filter out flights that we wouldn't take ourselves - we don't send out any deals with really long layovers, multiple stops, airport transfers or ones that are on really low quality airlines. We also take things like the time of year of the itinerary (we don't send deals to Moscow in January for example). Ultimately all of this is to save users time and hassle when booking their vacation and to ensure we can help them have the best travel experience possible.
It's counter-intuitive but the things you think are your advantage (i.e. sending less, more focused deals) might actually be disadvantage.
Very small numbers of offered deals end up being used anyway because people don't fly that often.
The business model is to keep people subscribed and paying for stream of deals.
Getting more deals, even if they are not perfect, makes people think they get a lot of value from the subscription. In this specific case perception of value is very important for retaining customers.
I think this is a fair critique. I'd be hesitant to compromise on the quality of the deals we're sending just to make it seem like we're giving more to our users, but you're absolutely right - the product is practically of negative utility until a user books a deal. Presenting them with more opportunities to book increases the chances of them locking in that value.
I think there's ways we can increase those chances without forcing users to do as much work as scott's deals do. There's certainly some interesting things we could do with allowing users to personalize the product.
Either way, very insightful - certainly something I've been thinking a lot about recently.
Makes sense. Good luck!
Thanks! Since you signed up, would love to hear your thoughts after you get a few deals. Feel free to ping us at founders@wingsflightclub.com
Is this available outside of US cities yet?
Unfortunately not yet, it's only available in NYC and soon LA and SF.