How a product feature inspired by personal experience got mentioned on Forbes.

Hello Indiehackers,

I'm Justin Albertynas - founder and CEO of a travel-tech startup called RatePunk.

It's been a pretty long run for me, and many of you know me already, but just in case you don't, I'm a veteran Indiehacker with 10+ startups and products founded and counting.

My current main project, RatePunk was recently featured in the Forbes. This is one of the most exciting marketing things to happen to us because it was free and was about our product.

So, I'm writing this post because I wanted to share how I leveraged my personal experiences and disappointments about the industry to create something that was worthy of a Forbes feature!

Ideas manifest earlier than you think

I was infatuated with travel for the longest time, so even way back when I wasn't even an entrepreneur or an Indie hacker, I picked up on the solo traveling trend.

But there arose one issue - safety.

Researching safety for your destinations, especially hotels, was a pain back in the day (before Numbeo was founded or popular). You would have to get the general idea from social media, reviews, and various news reports.

And I think that's the time when the idea for this feature manifested - I thought how awesome it would be to just compile all of this online data and words into some interface that would be satisfying and informative.

But then, my mind was still elsewhere, and I didn't think that was really possible, so I focused on other things.

Small features = big wins

But when I started founding my first startups, creating software, and in general, working with the web, I discovered what scraping is, and so on.

and suddenly

When working on Ratepunk, the idea just came back to me, and we finally figured it out with our dev team! We launched it, and to be honest... didn't think much of it as it wasn't as big as some other features we've had, like:

• The first price negotiating tool for Airbnb
• live hotel price comparison WHILE browsing
• detecting different price changes for booking your hotels through a VPN.

These were some of the heavy hitters that we thought would make a splash with the media, but instead, it was this one very personal to me feature that got the first mention with screenshots of our app and all in the big media.

The lesson

Pitch everything! Talk about everything you have to offer and do it all the time.

This particular feature came from a pitch to a journalist who was researching what travel companies are doing about traveler safety - can't be more perfect, right?

It pays to always be on the lookout

Thanks for reading this. It's more of a personal story this time, sure - there are lessons to be learned, but in general, I just wanted to share a personal win, which I was very excited about.

Cheers, and have a good week, Indiehackers.