Dude, just go!
A ChatGPT-based Travel Planning site. Booking coming soon
Today we added a Viator integration to show users tours and activities that are associated with each day in their AI-generated Itinerary. This is the first step in our monetization strategy. The next step is to find and integrate a full booking provider so users can book flights and hotels based on their Itinerary.
This is exciting news and we can't wait to get to work building out our booking engine!
What a pain in the ass! I am working on adding Authentication the Dude, just go. I decided to use Firebase as they have the most user-friendly Authentication service I have used so far. I have experience with AWS Cognito, Okta, and Auth0. For basic authentication cases, Firebase is the GOAT. It's still a pain in the ass but it is a little better with Firebase.
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It’s a pain in the ass.
I don’t know if you have tried Clerk. I’m implementing now and it’s going well.Worth a try.
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No, I have not heard of them. I will look into them in case I need a more sophisticated solution in the future.
For now, the decision was based on ease of development and no adding another provider as I use Firebase for hosting as well.
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It can be hard to stay motivated and dedicate so much time to your work. I have a day job as a software engineer, so getting the motivation to continue to code in my off time comes and goes. This is ok, not ideal, but ok. Don't beat yourself up over it.
My motivation tends to go super high when I have the initial idea, then I think through the problem and get discouraged by the amount of effort it will take to accomplish the goal.
Alex Hormozi's content has been a big help to me in this regard. Two of his messages in particular have helped me get back on the right path and work on this project.
1) The goal is the doing, not the achievement
2) Did you think this would be easy? No? This is what hard feels like.
I am back on track and more motivated than ever.
I had originally planned to monetize the site with advertising and affiliate marketing. This proved to be tricky as I had a hard time getting approved for ad networks because the pages on my site look like they don't have content when they are scraped.
I decided to pivot and turn this into a full booking site. There are numerous API's that will allow me to tap into hotel and flight networks. I also would like to add activities and tours to allow users to book a full vacation in just a few clicks.
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I tried to test our your site and seeing CORS error when doing itinerary search:
Inputs:
- maui
- 8/15/2023
- 8/29/2023
"Access to fetch at 'https://api.dudejustgo.com/prod/itinerary' from origin 'https://dudejustgo.com' has been blocked by CORS policy: Response to preflight request doesn't pass access control check: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. If an opaque response serves your needs, set the request's mode to 'no-cors' to fetch the resource with CORS disabled."
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Ok, you should be good to try now. Just FYI, not all the authentication work is completed. You can create an account but the reset password and email verification flows are not completed.
Once again, thanks for checking out my work.
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Hi @trcarney, I was able to successfully generate an itinerary for Maui without being logged in which appears to be as designed.
I tried a longer trip to see what sort of activities it would plan for me and was surprised it generated some options for activities (since I didn't have enough activities for the days I'd be there).
Do you provide more data/integrations to paying customers? For example, I would have liked to have some options on where to book my activities. The planned itinerary day is dependent on whether that activity is available on that day for the providers of that service/activity.
My inputs:
maui
10/26/2023
11/10/2023
parasail, zipline, kayakingI'm not sure if there are APIs available to return possible companies that could provide the service near the desired location, or if it's only available with a paid subscription. In my case, where can I go ziplining on day 3 (10/28/2023) in Maui?
My suggestion would be to advertise a paid option to view providers in the area to do said activity. Might help to convert users to a paid subscription as the immediate use case enticed me when it returned results.
Alternatively, you could structure your paid option through the providers of the service to advertise activities from their location on your site. I imagine then the users wouldn't have to pay to see the results or you could offer advanced features to users willing to pay a one time fee for additional features on top. I like this option more as it starts to look more like B2B (even with the B2C marketplace aspect of having to attract users to generate itineraries). It may also require direct advertisement deals with activity providers instead of the generalized advertisement platform (e.g. google) you mentioned which hasn't worked. I also like the B2B route a more because a single consumer probably goes on vacation once a year (average, I would suspect), whereas an activity provider is more likely to pay monthly to advertise on your platform; better and more predictable MRR.
Good work up to this point!
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Excellent Questions.
The current plan is to become a booking site similar to Expedia, etc. I have already lined up an API provider for airline and hotel bookings. They don't have activities yet so I will use Viator's affiliate API to generate links based on the location and activity for each day.
The basic premise is to go from, "I heard about this cool place on Instagram." to fully booked vacation in just a few clicks.
So far the only thing the account does is let you save your itinerary. With the way these LLMs work, it is almost impossible to get the exact same itinerary twice. I knew the authentication stuff would be necessary for the booking flow so I prioritized it before i started the booking work.
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@trcarney - which provider are you using for authentication (Hopefully you aren't rolling your own authentication)?
I recently implemented an Auth0 implementation with a React frontend and C#/.Net backend and have previously implemented a number of other authentication providers (including Azure and Okta).
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I just used firebase. It is easy to implement and I don't need a bunch of user groups and stuff, as of now.
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thanks for the heads up. I am working on a bunch of changes related to Authentication and it appears i pushed up a version of the Front-End with some of those changes without deploying the corresponding backend. I am hoping to finish those changes either today or tomorrow. I will let you know when it is good to go.
Thanks for checking it out.
I was originally going to start a travel blog. I have traveled to 35 countries so far in my life. These experiences have made me the person I am today. I wanted to inspire and help others have amazing experiences while learning and enjoying cultures around the world. As many of you know, travel may be one of the most competitive niches to start a blog in. I trudged forward anyway.
When ChatGPT was released in November 2022, I got the idea that ChatGPT could be used to make a personal blog post for every visitor on the site. So i started building, you can see what the site is now.
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