Anyone can now start planning their trip on TripTippa with their fellow travelers, with the option to pay for advisors (locals and frequent travelers) to help with their trip. The 2 main new features are a Trip Board, for adding ideas and options for your trip, and Polls, which allow you to poll the people you’re traveling with to help make decision-making easier. There is also a calendar for which you can drag and drop items, or simply by clicking ‘add to calendar’, and then export to Google or iCal.
Trip Board
It can be tough to keep track of everything you’re thinking of doing during your trip. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a Pinterest-style board where you can easily pin anything that you stumble across that sounds interesting (or looks delicious) for your trip? That’s the main idea for creating the Trip Board feature.
For each item on your Trip Board, the default status is ‘Optional’, and you can update the status either to ‘Doing’ (if you’ve decided you’re doing something that doesn’t require a payment or reservation of any sort) or ‘Booked’ (if you’ve committed to doing something and there would be some cost to cancel). You also have the option to notify other travelers when you update the status of anything on your Trip Board.
If you’ve set the address or area of where you’ll be staying during your trip, you will see the driving and walking distance to each option on your Trip Board.
You can also comment on each item on your board and have a discussion with your fellow travelers (or advisors).
Below is a quick video showing how to add something to your Trip Board.
Polls
When planning a trip, it can be tough to get everyone on the same page. Decisions need to get made, sometimes days or weeks in advance, and you want to ensure everyone’s voice is heard so that the trip is optimally enjoyable for the group. That’s why I’ve created Polls as a free feature to help manage your trip.
When you create a poll, everyone else on your trip will be notified so they can cast their vote. You can also set the expiration date for your poll as anywhere from 1–7 days (to incentivize others on your trip to submit their vote sooner).
Below is a quick video showing how it works.
The Decision to go Freemium
While reading Adam Savage’s book, Life’s What You Make It, I was intrigued about how over his career as a maker, he always opted to share as much as possible.
I’ve felt this way as long as I can remember. My bias has been toward openness: open source: freemium pricing; open door policies…if it involves getting more creative knowledge and tools into the hands of more people, I have been all for it.
After reading those lines, I got inspired to build a free version of TripTippa.
While the freemium model is common in software, I had always rejected the idea for TripTippa. My reasoning was that what you paid for on TripTippa was convenience as well as quality, personalized advice, and to make it free would mean to either add features to manage your trip (for which I thought there were better options on the web for that) or to pay advisors through an affiliate revenue model (which would potentially create a conflict with the purpose of providing quality, personalized and unbiased advice).
While paying advisors through an affiliate revenue model is out of the question, building features to manage your trip was something that could be done and would complement the core product and mission. My initial assumption that there are better options for planning your trip may be true, however I ultimately decided that it was worth it to build out these free trip management features since TripTippa could provide a unique advantage of being able to easily collaborate with advisors in planning and managing your trip. Furthermore, it complements a core mission of making travel easier.
From that insight I started to build out the free features. A few months later and those features are now live.
If you want to get started on planning a trip, just head to triptippa.com, choose a destination and you’ll be guided through the rest of the process to create your trip. Once you’ve created your trip, you can add items to your Trip Board, invite fellow travelers on, and create Polls. I would be grateful for any feedback, thoughts, or ideas on the product and the new features.
Up Next
What’s next for TripTippa? Here’s what I’m trying to decide between, let me know your thoughts in the comments, or vote on our Twitter poll:
- Allow advisors on the platform to book your entire trip.
- Make it easy to hire a translator or photographer wherever you travel.
- Enable connections to locals through gamification and shared effort that benefit the local community or environment.
- Enable video and podcast creation and sharing for travelers on the platform.
- Improve the algorithm that onboards advisors at a particular destination
I’m also starting up a new venture, called SnackDial, which delivers personalized yogurt batches to you. I thought since grocery stores don’t always have the consistency, flavor, and toppings you’re looking for, it would be a lot better if you could personalize an order of 6 yogurts. If you’re interested, please drop your email at snackdial.com.
