(sent out May 21st, 2018)
Back in December, I asked many of you for help deciding whether Hitlist should raise a venture round or sell to a company who could open up massive distribution opportunities. A third way was proposed: see if our users would pay us for a product they seemed to love.
Today, we have our first 50 paying users of Hitlist Premium, which we’ll officially launch in the next week (if you can’t see it in app now, you’ll be able to by the end of the week). For $5 a month, as of now, you gain access to members-only fares; the ability to specify airlines, number of stops, and time of day of departure for your alerts; and custom travel advice from our in house experts.
Continuing to build the Hitlist we want to see — a product that inspires and enables you to travel more, leveraging advice from your friends and machine learning technology — is the greatest privilege I could ask for. This month’s focus is making sure the Premium launch goes through the roof.
This month’s ask:
- Have you or someone you know successfully marketed a freemium product? I’d love to hear tips.
- Upgrade to Premium and tell your friends!
UPDATES:
- In-app updates other than Premium: handy new shortcuts to ‘recently viewed deals’ and ‘similar deals’, highlighted events when you look at a city page, and a bunch of tiny tweaks you’ll only notice subliminally.
- Our partnership with Wanderlust festivals is live — you can see the flight widget we developed at the Tnooz/Voyager hackathon last fall on the ‘plan’ pages for their US/Canadian summer festivals.
- We’re also running a giveaway with Wanderlust, enter to win $1,000 flight credit, accommodation in Whistler, tickets to the Wanderlust festival, spa package and more here.
- I’m speaking at the Travel Disruption Summit in NYC this coming week, let me know if you’ll be in town.
- We have so much interesting data about travel preferences and we’re starting to share it more widely, leading to things like this coverage in Forbes.
WHY WE’RE DOING THIS:
The tourism sector creates jobs that our economy needs. According to this great report from the Center for an Urban Future: ‘no other sector offers as many accessible jobs, with 91 percent of tourism jobs open to workers with less than a bachelor’s degree. The tourism sector also reflects the diversity of the city. More than 65 percent of New York City residents who work in tourism-related industries are people of color and 54 percent are immigrants, compared to 59 percent and 44 percent, respectively, of workers in other sectors.’ (h/t Rafat Ali for tweeting the study).
GIF OF THE MONTH:
With all the buzz about psychedelics these days, here’s a reminder that you don’t need drugs to go on a trip.
