The story of Hitlist: how backpacking inspired a travel app that scaled to 1.8 million users.

We hear from Gillian Morris at the World Youth and Student Travel Conference (WYSTC) held in Lisbon last October, where she was a keynote speaker and shared her story of creating Hitlist — a pioneering flight search app that was inspired by her backpacking journeys.

This article written by Kevin O’Shaughnessy, Dublin Travel Massive leader, and co-founder of CityHook — a travel platform for airport connections.

🎧 Listen to the podcast interview with Gillian below —

https://soundcloud.com/travelmassive/episode-33-gillian-morris

Introducing Hitlist

Hitlist is an app that alerts you when prices drop for trips you want to take. Instead of the typical search for destinations and dates which is the de-facto standard for airlines and travel websites, the Hitlist user instead saves the destinations they’re interested in, and as much or as little detail as they wish (such as dates/trip duration and so on). Hitlist then monitors flight prices for the user until something comes up.

This doesn’t suit every user, but for the flexible, it’s ideal. Instead of lurking on flight search sites, the deals come direct to the user instead.

🌎 Find out more about Hitlist at hitlistapp.com
📱 Download the Histlist app (iOS)

Hitlist has been training their algorithms to match customers with airfare for over 6 years now, is profitable and has grown without ad spending to over 1.8M users.

The Untold Story of Flight Search

Gillian had pitched Hitlist after a lukewarm reaction to another flight search website she had worked on, called TripCommon. The reaction was night and day, she recalls. The team knew before Hitlist was released that they had a hit on their hands. However, “98% of investors said ‘No’ straight up” saying that flight search, in particular consumer flight search is hard to scale and has terrible margins.

What a budding travel tech entrepreneur may not know is that working with flight data is expensive. In fact, the standard cost of an individual flight search is in the range of 2.2c per query. “Running 100 searches on Kayak might run them a bill of $2, and you may not even book anything with them”. When the booking is placed, commission is famously thin too.

Working Around Limitations

So, the commission is low, the data is expensive and the customer acquisition cost is immense. In spite of it all, the team found a new way through these challenges and still built a compelling app and a profitable company. Tune in about 15 minutes into the podcast to hear how.

Gillian reckons that about two-thirds of her user base is organic growth: word of mouth typically. In the early days, they managed over 15000 downloads in their first week. She attributes this to a healthy address book of loose and close contacts, an early appearance at Web Summit which led to coverage in The Next Web and then other news outlets picking up on their coverage.

The all-time high is not high enough

We talked in detail about their early growth and how the team was able to create something valuable and still quite unique. Gillian has raised funding to grow her business. What we may not realize is just how improbable this was.

According to Gillian, only 4% of funding goes to female founding teams like hers. This was recently echoed by data from PitchBook (reported at TechCrunch) that in 2019, we’ve seen an “all time high” in the US — of 2.8% of funding going to female founding teams. This is truly disheartening. “[People need to] realize that they do tend to have explicit biases which are resulting in them giving less women funding”.

She refers to research from MIT that points to these intrinsic biases which, for the same quality of proposal, shows that attractive men are more likely to raise funding over any other founder.

🎧 Listen to the podcast on Soundcloud, Overcast or your favourite player

Special thanks.

Thanks to WYSE for inviting us to interview at WYSTC in Lisbon this year, in particular Wendy Morrill.
Photography via WYSE.

— Thanks Kevin and Gillian! Connect with Hitlist on Travel Massive.