My time at Hipmunk
Hipmunk, company that defined a large part of my career, is shutting down in seven days. This is a rambly post about it that I'm optimizing for timeliness over quality.
I joined in 2015 after leaving a failed startup, hoping to find out what life was like as an iOS developer while making travel search slightly nicer for ordinary people. Over the next two and a half years, I evolved from an overeager young engineer to a trusted engineering leader and manager, which enabled me to ultimately move on to Asana as the manager of the iOS team.
Hipmunk was full of people who wanted to make finding flights and hotels just a little bit easier. The entire value proposition was the user experience, and as an engineer, it was very rewarding to have almost all my work be in service of making a common experience a little bit nicer. There were lots of passionate people who were friendly, fun to be around, and good at their jobs.
I'm not the best qualified person to diagnose Hipmunk's failure, but from a business standpoint it was never exactly “crushing it.” Margins are thin for sales lead middlemen (i.e. metasearch sites), and airlines are complete bastards when it comes to their data. A lot of Hipmunk's revenue was coming from Yahoo Travel when I joined, and it shut down in 2016, which made things even tougher.
Users were hard to hang onto. We had to recapture them every time they decided to start searching for flights or hotels. The features we built to keep users around regularly all failed to move the needle, and half the time the people using our search wouldn't click our booking links even though they ended up buying the flights, so we wouldn't get paid.
Hipmunk made some technical decisions that in my experience made development much more challenging than necessary. Our home-grown ORM was poorly understood, our database usage was weird and badly optimized, and we had multiple huge rewrites of web code in React + Redux without understanding best practices, leaving messes for future engineers to clean up under pressure to ship even more changes.
There were some engineering bright spots. Hipmunk's in-house analytics platform was expensive to maintain but extremely accessible to everyone at the company and used by most people in all departments. Hackathons were approached with genuine passion, and many projects shipped, some even being integrated into the product strategy. Here's a video of one of mine:
The program shown in the video is completely functional and you can really book flights and hotels using w3m. The code came together really quickly because I had already rewritten mobile web flight search singlehandedly, as well as writing lots of hotel search code on iOS.
Hipmunk had a ritual of “demo time” every Friday afternoon, where anyone could show the rest of us what they had been working on. I like showing my work and I did a lot of getting-pixels-on-the-screen, so I gained a reputation for being Demo Guy. I liked being Demo Guy and I miss it.
On the product side, the bag was similarly mixed. We wasted thousands of engineer hours building things that never got traction and never made money. We had a full time team of 3+ working on a chat bot for some reason. Meanwhile, as the team shrank first after layoffs and then after the Concur acquisition, we didn't have enough engineers to address tech debt or even maintain existing systems. And honestly, in hindsight, I'm not even sure we should have had native mobile apps.
That said, I did get to do a lot of things I'm proud of as an engineer, alongside Jesus Fernandez, Wojtek Szygiol, Cameron Askew, and Ivan Tse, plus wonderful designers Lauren Porter and Tony Dhimes, and PM Devin Ruppenstein: * Built the best reusable, configurable calendar picker the world has ever seen * Designed an interesting and practical interview question that I used to hire an excellent engineer * Designed a scalable, clean, teachable iOS app architecture and slowly migrated the whole app to it * Rewrote the entire mobile web flight search site by myself to have a better user experience and use a faster API * Shipped the mobile web flight search site as part of the native app using a wrapper so clever you can barely tell it's secretly a web page
I made all of this:
Could Hipmunk have worked as a business under slightly different circumstances or with a different set of product decisions? Maybe. I'm not sure. Maybe with a small, bootstrapped team, but even then I wouldn't bet on it. The margins are too tight and the users aren't loyal, for good reason—all they want is a good price on a good flight or hotel.
Speaking of hotels, though, I invite you to look at Hipmunk Hotels:
And then look at Google Hotels around November 2018:
And then look at Steve Vargas's LinkedIn profile. 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔