Shutting down Wanderlust Society and parting thoughts
By now we’ve communicated directly with all existing users that Wanderlust Society will be shutting down on December 31st, 2018. In this post, we thought we would offer some color for those interested on the decision to end the project.
The original concept driving Wanderlust Society was a place to find and plan trips tailored just for you. Traditional travel discovery sites often presented long lists of hotels or destinations in average star rating order, putting the burden on users to have to read lots of reviews to discover people like themselves to determine which reviews to trust. It made travel planning a chore. There had to be a better way.
The first step we took in building a personalized travel platform was to allow users to make their own travel plans by saving any links they found on the Internet and attaching a photo with a map location. Users would save links to a Trip idea board and any saved ideas could then be instantly mapped and made available to other users for discovery. It was a fun, graphic way to assemble and share trip itineraries.
A problem that quickly became apparent was that most users either didn’t want to spend time assembling trip ideas on their own or didn’t know where to start. Imagine wanting to go to Barcelona. If you’ve never been there, how would you know what ideas to save?
Another problem was people took major trips only once or twice per year. That meant they weren’t visiting the site very often. Since our travel discovery ideas were all user generated, we weren’t growing trip idea content fast enough.
From a technology perspective, we built what is referred to in the tech biz as a single page app (SAP). Today, many modern and popular sites like Medium.com are built as single page apps. While this technology platform was likely a great long term choice for growth, it was probably overkill for what we needed early-on, a fast and light weight prototyping environment. When you’re still in problem discovery mode, anything to get software in-front of users for feedback is more important than robustness and scalability. Hindsight being 20/20, we should have run many experiments using light software/static hybrids as prototypes (similar to what’s described in Design Sprint thinking) to better understand what problems people were having in the travel sector. We lost a lot of time building a well architected but rigid platform.
But even having come up with a perfect solution for personalized travel discovery, we could have still been lead to a failure situation. The consumer travel sector is incredibly difficult to break into due to mature and very well established players. Also, there is the need for any consumer travel site to offer information for most anywhere someone might want to travel. If your site doesn’t provide people ideas for where they want to go, they can’t be customers. So, a consumer travel solution must offer a global breadth in location ideas which is very difficult for a startup to provide.
We all learned a bunch from the project that we’ll surely take-on to future endeavors. As is the case with failure, it may offer seeds of learning that could lead to future successes. All of us working on the project are still great friends and truly enjoyed working with each other. We thank all our beta testers for spending time giving us feedback and supporting the project. We also thank many friends and past colleagues who have helped us with feedback and some even with coding. You are all class acts.
Wanderlust Society will become unavailable just after December 31st, 2018 and all user data will be permanently removed. If you have any questions about your data, please send an email out to hello@wanderlustsociety.co.
Thanks again to everyone who helped us with the project and keep traveling!
