We’re Scott Keyes and Brian Kidwell, co-founders of Scott’s Cheap Flights. Ask us anything!

Haha great question! Scott was sending these deals to his friends and family for a couple years before it became a business. We had a long list of business name ideas at one point, but didn't like any of them so went with Scott's Cheap Flights. Scott has always been the one that finds the deals and I'm more of a behind-the-scenes kind of guy anyway :-)

Very little! It might be surprising but ours has been almost entirely organic growth; friends telling friends. Up until a month or two ago we had a zero-dollar marketing budget, and even in the past few months the amount we’ve spent on marketing has been miniscule.

One of the reasons we’ve been able to largely rely on organic growth is that travel isn’t a niche product space. Everyone loves cheap flights! So rather than having to try hard to find our audience and pay for a ton of ads to gin up customers who might be interested, we’ve always taken the approach that everyone is a potential customer, and done our best to encourage subscribers to tell their friends.

Hmm this is an interesting question. We've seen people try to apply it to a few different industries including tech product deals and real estate, but I'm not sure if any of them are having success with it.

I think the ad-based free subscriber model is easier to replicate across different industries. Look at theSkimm or The Hustle for example. They both do an excellent job curating information and sending daily emails that their subscribers love. They've built audiences that advertisers pay a lot of money to get in front of. I've recently seen this model replicated in both travel and crypto.

Creating a paid subscription model is a bit more difficult. You have to figure out where to draw the line between free subscribers and paid subscribers. And you have to make sure that the amount a subscriber is paying you is way less than the value they get out of your service. In our case people pay $39/yr and can save hundreds of dollars per ticket.

So unfortunately I don't have any other markets in mind that fit this criteria, but if you figure that out I'm sure you'd have some success with it!

We have a ton of processes set up, but not much in the way of automation. That’s a feature, not a bug.

The appeal of automation is that it’s automatic, it takes the thinking out of the equation. The problem with automation, at least as it relates to finding cheap flights, is that it’s automatic and takes the thinking out of the equation. For example, say there’s a flight from LAX to Bangkok for $400 roundtrip. Amazing right? Except that flight is on a carrier that frequently has long delays and cancellations, has an overnight layover, and connects through a country that you need a visa to leave the airport. $400 is a great price, but not when you take into account all those factors! It’s not that it’d be impossible to automate the multitude of different factors that determine whether a deal is good or not, but the sheer number of variables would make it a massive undertaking.

So even though we don’t have much in the way of automation, we do set up tons of processes, both relating to how to search for cheap flights (can’t give away too much of the secret sauce there!) and how to manage business affairs. Everything from monitoring social media feedback to weekly coffee chats between team members to daily check-ins about what people are working on.

Honestly, it was frustrating at first, but it has certainly had its benefits. We spent a lot of time sharing our successes, failures, and strategies online expecting people to take those lessons and apply them to their own businesses. However, we were a bit naive and didn’t expect someone would just rip us off. We certainly learned that lesson the hard way haha.

Now there are plenty of copycats out there. They’d copy the website design, email design, deals we sent out, etc. We see new ones pop up all the time and have become a bit numb to it at this point.

The biggest frustration for us is when our subscribers are confused and think that these people just white label our service, or even worse, that we’re the ones copying someone else’s business. So then we have to explain what’s going on and the backstory of SCF.

After spending a lot of time and money fighting these copycats there came a time where we had to decide whether we’d spend our time trying to tear these other sites down or spend that time and energy making our service better. We chose the latter.

We hired more people to search for deals all over the world 24/7. We hired more people to help out with customer service to make sure we have the best support out there and can help any of our subscribers when they have a question. We’ve invested heavily into our development team and have been working hard behind the scenes to make everything work as smoothly as possible.

The copycats forced us to improve our business and think more long term, so I’m definitely grateful for that!

This is a fun question! I don’t think there was ever one specific point that it really hit us. There would be spikes and then we’d expect things to go back down to “normal.” This continues to happen but “normal” continues to grow.

The first experience we had with this was when Condé Nast Traveler posted an article about the service back in February 2016. This was before SCF had its own website and we were still running it off of Scott’s ebook website. This made us think it would be a good idea to spin it off into its own website and give it a real name.

Then after we launched scottscheapflights.com Scott went on Reddit and did an AMA, which crashed the website and once again created a huge spike in sign ups. This is the point when Scott and I both quit everything else we were doing and went full time on the business. However, we still expected things to go back down to “normal” after this, but it just continued growing :-)

Great question! I think it's one of the most surprising things that people learn about SCF flight searching that it's almost entirely done manually. Boutique, hand-crafted flight searches!

Computers are great, don't get me wrong, but so much of the value SCF tries to bring isn't providing the most number of possible flights, but the absolute best. Curation is something that humans tend to accomplish much better than computers. Definitely not ideologically opposed to automation, but there's limits to its usefulness, and it's definitely not a panacea to flight searching the way some might envision.

Also yes, will do our best to keep an eye out for more good Tokyo deals!

Most of our growth still comes from word of mouth since we haven’t invested into marketing or advertising very heavily yet. However, the bigger we get the more difficult it is to move the needle with word of mouth alone. We do viral giveaways almost every month because they’re fun and still bring in some new subscribers. We’ve also dabbled with ads recently, which has been interesting.

Right now our biggest challenge is around technology and scaling. We’re in the middle of a massive migration that is going to allow us to do some really cool stuff in the near future. Once this is done we’ll be able to provide an even better experience for SCF subscribers and also start investing into marketing and advertising channels.

(1) Explained better what SCF is. A big cheap flight email subscription hadn’t really existed before SCF, and while it’s extraordinarily flattering to help develop a new market, there’s a ton of challenges that it presents as well. Many people sign up for SCF thinking we’re like Kayak and you can book your flights through us, or that we’re a travel agent who you can give destinations and dates to and they’ll bring back a cheap flight. Educating potential subscribers about what SCF is and how it operates is something we could’ve done better initially and if I’m being honest even today.

(2) Been willing to hire more people earlier on. Even though we were profitable from day 1, the notion that we could wake up any day and the dream would somehow be over felt omnipresent. That fear that it might not work out probably led us to be a bit more conservative than we should have been in the first 6-12 months. Add to that the element of pride. I used to be the only flight searcher, and I loved doing it! Probably a little too much because I took myself to the edge of burnout before being willing to bring other flight searchers onto the team and trust that they could do the work as well. (Lucky I finally conquered that fear because the crew of flight searchers we have now is better and smarter than me!)

Reposting from a similar question about what are two important things we would've done differently knowing everything we know now. Hope that's okay!

(1) Explained better what SCF is. A big cheap flight email subscription hadn’t really existed before SCF, and while it’s extraordinarily flattering to help develop a new market, there’s a ton of challenges that it presents as well. Many people sign up for SCF thinking we’re like Kayak and you can book your flights through us, or that we’re a travel agent who you can give destinations and dates to and they’ll bring back a cheap flight. Educating potential subscribers about what SCF is and how it operates is something we could’ve done better initially and if I’m being honest even today.

(2) Been willing to hire more people earlier on. Even though we were profitable from day 1, the notion that we could wake up any day and the dream would somehow be over felt omnipresent. That fear that it might not work out probably led us to be a bit more conservative than we should have been in the first 6-12 months. Add to that the element of pride. I used to be the only flight searcher, and I loved doing it! Probably a little too much because I took myself to the edge of burnout before being willing to bring other flight searchers onto the team and trust that they could do the work as well. (Lucky I finally conquered that fear because the crew of flight searchers we have now is better and smarter than me!)

This is a great question! A few thoughts.

First, not entirely sure I’d agree that I was popular or notable online beforehand. I’d previously worked as a political journalist, but entirely separate audiences. What I think was popular was the content. Just like the kid who’s “popular” because he has an XBox while his friends don’t, I think it’s the content (cheap flights) that’s popular rather than me or us per se.

That said, the question is absolutely a valid one. One of the great things about places like IndieHackers or Reddit or other networks is there are niche communities where you can find your tribe. This is especially true if what you’re building revolves around more niche content.

Another thing I’d note here is the importance of product-market fit. I’ve had friends who quit their day-jobs, invested tens of thousands of dollars into a start-up, built a fast and slick-looking app, only to realize months later that there wasn’t actually much demand for what they were building. Instead, I’m a devotee of finding more micro-opportunities to test out if there’s demand for the overarching product you want to sell. Build a simple website, nothing fancy, put together a simple email list, at most do a couple hundred dollars in test ads, and see if there’s much response. If there is great! You may be on to something and you can make what you’re building fast and pretty later. But if there’s not much response, it can be good to fail quickly and try something else out, rather than fail slowly and lose months and thousands in the process.

Great question.

Places like Kayak and TripAdvisor have alert mechanisms built in, but frankly none are all that good, for a few reasons. First, the amount of bandwidth required to be constantly searching is astronomical; as a result they don’t search often enough and miss tons of the cheap flights and mistake fares. Second, they only search their own inventory of flights they sell. Most people don’t care if they buy their flight on Orbitz or Kayak or directly with the airline, they just wanna get a great deal. Third, they only search the specific routes you’ve set up an alert for, so you’d miss out on everything else. This isn’t trivial; one of the best deals I ever got in my life — nonstop from NYC to Milan for $130 roundtrip — I never would’ve gotten an alert for from those sites, because I lived in DC, not NYC, and because Milan wasn’t somewhere on my radar. (Of course, for $130 I’d go anywhere.)

We built SCF to address those shortcomings. The best deals don’t last very long, often times only a few hours. There was a deal a couple months ago from all over the US to New Zealand for $390 roundtrip. TripAdvisor and Kayak and everywhere else missed it because it happened in the evening and wasn’t initially bookable on those sites, but since SCF doesn’t get any commissions we can find the cheapest flights anywhere and send subscribers to wherever they are rather than staying loyal to a specific airfare seller. Because we’re much faster at finding the deals than those other sites, it gives subscribers that much extra time to decide if they want to book any given deal. If so, that extra time can be crucial on the best deals that are apt to disappear quickly.

They’re all over! New York City is number one, both because of population and because it’s the cheap flight capital of the US, but we have subscribers in over 100 countries around the world and we send out cheap flight deals departing just about everywhere.

Hey thank you! Very kind of you to say :-)

Since we don’t take commissions or kickbacks, our revenue comes from subscribers who join the premium list for its extra perks. These include access to all the deals (just one-third go to free subscribers), selecting their home airport for alerts, receiving deals at least 30 minutes early, and no ads.

In the world of flight deals, one thing I think there’s a desperate need for is a secondary market for tickets. Let’s say you bought a $150 flight that you can no longer take. It makes no sense to cancel it, because most airlines charge a $150 to do that! If you could sell it on a secondary market to someone else who might want that seat for $100 though, how great would that be?