GooseChase is a successfully bootstrapped web and mobile platform for creating and facilitating scavenger hunts. Through our website, organizers create custom "hunts" for anything from on-boarding new employees, touring museums, educating students and more! Participants can compete as teams or individuals to submit photo/video, text or GPS based missions through our native Android and iOS apps.
We've grown quite a lot this year and are looking to hire a Senior Full Stack Engineer that will take major ownership of our back-end going forward. We've historically been a Django monolith (React front-end), but are increasingly moving towards breaking that up into microservices (mostly with node) to better handle our growing engineering team and load.
If you love working on something fun, but challenging, we'd love for you to apply at [email protected], or email me directly at andrew[at]goosechase[dot]com.
If I'm understanding correctly, you are hoping this will become a site where people come for travel inspiration (e.g. I'm thinking of a trip to Thailand, so I come to your site, see the trips the travel bloggers have put up and go through them). If that's correct, you're going to have a tremendously hard time getting this off the ground.
Why don't you just focus on the travel bloggers side to begin with? Specifically, I think there's a need for a Soundcloud-esque embeddable widget that people can put directly in their blogs (naturally linking back to you). THAT provides real value IMO. Most blogs are highly entertaining, but they rarely have mapped content - you can provide that.
From someone that's founded a travel marketplace & failed, avoid network effects in the beginning if at all possible. It's a whole other level of pain, that in your case at least, I don't think is needed.
I'm actually going backpacking for 3 months starting next week, so if you come out with a widget, I'm more than happy to use the beta versions and give you feedback.
Network effects are great...when you have them. But in the beginning you won't. That's why if you can provide value to an individual user without requiring network effects, it will make your life a lot easier.
In this case, if you get bloggers using your product, logging their trips, etc, you'll slowly build up your content. Once it's comprehensive enough for travellers to get value from it, you'll be able to build network effects from a much stronger position.
The biggest request I have is for alternative rule-sets. The pools I typically participate in are a lot less involved - e.g. pick the winner & runner up for a each group and go from there. Going game-by-game with scores is too much for a lot of people.
Hi andrewcross,
Unfortunately managing alternative rule sets would have very important impacts on our architecture, we reasonnably cannot provide it for the world cup... But I hear the feedback for possible future versions ! Thks.
This actually seems like something Airbnb would want to acquire. From what I've heard, setting the price is still one of the most painful parts of hosting. Having this available for all users by default would be a huge plus.
While it's always tough when one of your main competitive advantages is price, this is a smart move for them. Really good talking point to get people in the door and away from Eventbrite. Best of luck!
“It seems like we're a great fit. I'm excited. Before we go any further exploring a potential deal I want to bring up that we're fully focused on building world class technology and on servicing and supporting our customers to massive success. What that means is that we're not investing in marketing and sales as heavily because our happy customers are referring us to others who could benefit from our product. Does that sound like a fair arrangement to you?”
What a great way to phrase the ask. Switches from you pressuring them for the referral to making them want to help.
This is very typical way of approaching sales and arrangements in the sales world. Sandler sales and a lot of other sales techniques / principles apply this, and I've seen it work wonders
I don't know about a lot of these, but I run a travel startup so I can comment about the travel agencies restriction.
Travel in general is seen as a high risk industry. Try going to a bank for a merchant account, tell them you run a travel company and watch their reaction. They don't really want you as a customer anymore. The risk profile is too high.
There's a couple main reasons for this.
One, there's a higher than normal chargeback rate in travel. Think about this, you get to your destination and find out that the online pictures of your hotel are nothing like reality. You feel like you've been scammed, but the owner refuses to give you a refund. You aren't left with a lot of options. But if you booked with your credit card, you can request a chargeback and go stay some place nicer.
This same idea can be applied to inclement weather, an inferior tour, etc. Your expectations are different than reality, you can't get a refund, so you request a chargeback.
Two, the average transaction size is travel is quite large. If I'm upset with my dinner at a restaurant, I might be out $20. If I'm upset with my hotel on a vacation, I might be out $500-$1,000. That's a big difference. I might be able to live with losing $20, but definitely not $500+. So I go through the hassle of a chargeback since the dollar amount makes it worth it.
Between the two of these reasons, you end up with a high risk industry.
I'd imagine all the other industries that are prohibited have similar risk profiles.
The two easiest ways to find companies already doing a 4 day week would likely be: 1. Dedicated 4 day week job boards, such as 4 Day Week (https://4dayweek.io/). 2. Looking for articles highlighting companies with 4 day weeks, such as this piece from Angel (https://angel.co/job-collections/20-startups-with-4-day-work...).