Don’t let your data decide your product decisions

When we launched Tripnary we went the extra mile to make sure we tracked every possible user interaction in the app so that we didn’t make the mistake of building something that the users didn’t want. Our advisors often asked “What part of the app is used most?” and suggested that we focus the product where users are already spending the most time. Makes sense right? Let the voice of the customer guide the roadmap.

But we resisted.

Tripnary quickly reached a million swipes, people even called us “Tinder for travel”.

This was all very encouraging, but most people were using the app to create bucket lists and few were comparing flights — what we considered the unique selling proposition of the app. With Tripnary, our goal is not only to help you build your travel bucket list but make it actionable too. We are building an app that helps you decide your next destination from your bucket list based on your budget.

There are many apps that let you create a rudimentary list of places you want to go (Tripadvisor, Gogobot), but from the beginning Tripnary’s objective was to help you make this a reality. Why? Because we know that leisure travelers are constrained by their budget and dates, but are flexible about where they can go.

So even though our roadmap was obvious based on user data, we always asked ourselves, if that’s the path we wanted to take.

Don’t just act on symptoms when the root cause of a problem remains unaddressed…

We quickly realized that we needed to be careful with early data as it can both help and hinder you. Sometimes early data can tease you with interesting metrics, but may lack any meaningful insights. The danger with obsessing over every interaction the user performs based on early metrics is that you feel the need to start pivoting your product based on this data.

We got users started with creating their bucket list. We saw users getting hooked to the Tinder-esque swipe to add places to their bucket list. Some people spent upwards of two hours (!) doing this. With Tripnary, it would have been easy to build more features around mindlessly swiping places.