Recap:
- took about 3 months to ramp traffic up to 200 visitors / month
- return flight was not immediately intuitive for everyone
- received surprisingly good anecdotal responses, surprised to find that a number of visitors clicked through to book flights
- never formally contacted the airlines to organize data feed & commission.
- was approached by an ad agency looking to broaden their asia pacific website base.
- reached peak of several thousand visitors during Pope visit.
- not long after, Virgin blocked our data scraper.
Gained:
- Technologies - GWT, SpringMVC, HSQLDB
- SEO - delayed gratification. 30 minutes/day goes a very long way.
- Design - listen to users, but more importantly, OBSERVE. Analytics is invaluable. Involve user testing ASAP (friends) - start feedback loop early.
- Misc - register domain, host, maintain (impulsifly is arguably not a good name because it is prone to mistakes, but it was the best we could come up with)
There are avenues which we hadn't fully explored, but other opportunities have emerged so we have decided to cut impulsifly in pursuit of these other options.
I'll post more information here as we progress, but the profit of the current project we are working on is inversely proportional to its popularity.
A snap shot of impulsifly's main screen:
