Travlyng
A travelog and network for travelers
Trips are a set of Ideas for travelers as to what they can do, enjoy at any destination. Current focus is South and South East Asia. Interest (tag) based filters for now.
Example Trip (The Islands of South Asia): https://travlyng.com/trips/4/
Geo and Budget filters, Comments coming in July.
Trips is our first software+content feature, moving from a pure content site. We were discussing this since March 2019, and planning in detail since May 2019.
We plan to add 4000 Ideas (in about 40 Trips) covering global destinations before opening the system to community (user generated content). We are a team of 8.
Software is Python+React based.
We have recently crossed our 100 interviews mark. Now the focus is gradually shifting to building the core software-driven features which will allow Travelers to actually get a sense of what we have always wanted to build: tools to inspire, research and plan your trips.
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Wow, that's a lot of interviews! I'd love it if you shared some of your learnings.
I'm a digital nomad right now and trip planning takes me forever. I'd look forward to following you on the way to launch.
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Hey Lauren, thanks! Our 24 - 36 month target is 1000 interviews from travelers but we are going to make the process more automated. Currently we take travelers interviews on Twitter or Instagram chats or email. Soon we will be taking them on our webapp itself.
Our first stage for Trip planning is discovery and ideation features, which we are launching in mid-August, focusing on South and South East Asia. About 1500 - 2000 ideas will be there, search-able with hash-tags and geography.
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To be honest the last few months, we have been a bit side-tracked. So we brought things into a sharper perspective in April/May. We now have a new design live.
We restructured our content. We will soon be publishing our 100th interview and then 2 new features with focus on South Asia.
This is not complete or even correct, but launched anyhow: https://travlyng.com/cal/
Wow, that actually happened. We have already had 30+ interviews with travelers. Many of them really active and themselves have big followings on social media. The site still looks as simple as it can, but we will soon focus on giving it a proper blog/community feel.
We started an interview based outreach and content creation plan. It has worked well, although we have hardly reached out to a handful of travelers. Our first story on #solo travelers was published in mid October with interviews from 6 travelers.
We are team of 2 full time content/community managers, Ria and Jhilam. Saikat is still working on shared content. We are trying to figure out a good strategy for community building through Twitter. Usual content on travels are not good enough.
I continued to spend time engaging with travelers on Twitter. Mostly retweets, some exchange of chat, etc. This was just to test how difficult it will be to find engagement from travelers on Social Media.
Then I asked my friend Saikat to work part time, simply to post content from other travelers.
I was going through a ton of issues with my work and looking back at the many startups and products I have been with, I promised myself that I will stick with Travlyng through the entire year even if it does not show initial traction. Starting is a challenge and quitting is easy, so I promised against quitting too soon.
2 Comments
I checked out the site and the flow seems intuitive. It's good to get an insight into your journey so far. Also, your software stack seems robust. I think it makes sense to add a featurewise roadmap on the site to highlight your achievements and milestones.
Since our goals for Trips are large, here are some other details for young teams that are interested in such: