Seattle Developer Takes Flight With Popular Travel Site

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In search of beer money, a Seattle web developer starts his own travel site. He ends up with a business that attracts more than six million email subscribers. I did say six million. He's got a lot of people on his email list. But thankfully, he didn't have to get them anything for the holidays.

Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. The right kind of travel deal site can become a sensation that rivals a viral video. I'm reminded of a friend of ours, Scott Keyes, who runs the site Scott's Cheap Flights. We featured Scott on the program long ago and also in the "100 Cytosles" book.

On his own, as a journalist, Scott ended up building this really simple newsletter that became a million-dollar business, which is in many ways like what you'll hear about today, although Scott's model is one of a paid membership site. This story is largely about earning commissions. So same topic, but two different approaches that are both hugely successful. We're calling it "Seattle Developer Takes Flight with Travel Site." That story is coming up in just a moment. Dave Bull had long thought it would be fun to start a website focused on travel.

So when he looked for a project outside of his full-time job, creating "go last minute" was a natural fit. Dave was working for the Seattle-based company Real Networks as a project manager. That meant a lot of responsibility, but not a lot of time spent with hands-on coding. His side project would allow him to stay up to date with his tech skills. Way back in the early 2000s, he'd been a web developer for another travel site, where he learned how to improve the search forms so that more users would follow through with the booking process.

It was practical experience that he would draw upon now. He bought the domain "golastminute.com" for $1,000 through GoDaddy auctions. That was a lot of money compared to the $10 that an unclaimed domain would cost, but as soon as he saw it, he knew it was the one he wanted. Fortunately, that was his only real expense in the beginning, aside from $5 a month for hosting. In those days, the site was little more than a gateway to earn commissions through Expedia.com, the popular agency site.

Back then, the Expedia affiliate program was basic. You could link to it, but a technical limitation prevented anyone from including content and pricing on their own site. So you were essentially just sending visitors to Expedia without any context, which isn't great for referrals. But that wasn't a problem for Dave. He coded his own program to get pricing from Expedia and use it on GoLastMinute.

It was time-consuming and buggy, but the creative solution did what he needed it to do. Once he was set up, he didn't do much to promote the new venture. He told a few friends and ran some Google Ads to drive traffic to the site. About a week later, he referred his first customer, which brought him a commission of about $20. More referrals came in every now and then, and for the next few years, GoLastMinute was making enough money for Dave to cover a few luxuries here and there.

Or in his words, it was beer money. At some point, he decided it was time to get serious and see if he could grow it into a sustainable business. That decision came from his belief that he'd found a new way to grow the site's customer base. To him, it didn't make sense to do much else until he'd solved that issue. And his new idea was to redesign the website in a daily deals format.

At the time, sites like Groupon were growing rapidly, so he applied the same idea to GoLastMinute. The success of the website was directly tied to the number of subscribers to the site's daily email. The more people who subscribed, the more people who saw and then bought the deals through the site. And of course, the more money Dave made. Once he shifted his model to provide more information and daily deals, his subscriptions exploded.

Within two years, he had a million subscribers, and he now has about six million. Getting to those big numbers required some serious time and attention. It also required someone to create daily content with those travel deals going out by email. Dave had changed jobs to work at Microsoft, but found he was now making as much money from GoLastMinute as he was at his full-time job. He finally decided it was time to leave.

Since then, Dave has focused more on automating the content creation and marketing process. GoLastMinute uses both Facebook and Google Ads, although he says he's found Google Ads to be more effective because most Facebook users are browsing instead of seriously shopping. When he started using Google Ads, he did dozens of rounds of testing, trying out different copy and landing pages. He learned that display ads were less expensive than search ads and more profitable. Plus, he saw an opportunity in display ads because a lot of marketers were focused only on search.

With this Google Ads model, Dave can dial up or down how much money he puts into the ads each month. His biggest spend so far has been over $100,000 in one month just on those Google Ads. And by the way, if that sounds enormous, remember that the business is profitable. So as long as you're making more than you're spending, you should probably keep spending. Oddly enough, the biggest challenge wasn't getting to a high level of traffic.

The challenge came from trying to stay there. And the greatest threat to business turned out to be from Google itself. Go Last Minute relied on Google for paid and organic traffic, but when the tech giant launched Google Flights, they suddenly became a competitor. Another challenge Dave had was email deliverability. Because his service relies on subscribers getting emails, if a mail provider blocks all the emails from his website, that's a huge problem.

There are programs that monitor inbox rates and make suggestions for improvement, but it's far from a perfect scenario. Despite the challenges, in a recent year, Go Last Minute brought in more than $2 million. Dave has continued to stay current and just relaunched the site again on a new platform that he plans to make available to the public in early 2020. So sometimes when we look at these stories, it's often helpful to say if you're out there and you're trying to figure out what kind of project you should start, how do you make that decision? You know, is it based on your interest?

Is it based on your knowledge of a specific topic? Or is it based on a more core skill? And what I think is interesting about this project is this kind of business is great for an engineer, actually. It's not just about the coding, it's about the data analysis and optimization of ads. Everything he did to figure out the most effective Google ads, all the different tests and experiments that he ran, it wasn't so much about a specific knowledge of travel.

And, you know, for myself, even though I'm very knowledgeable about travel, I wouldn't be good at all at doing this because I don't have that kind of data analysis skill that really allowed Dave's business to take off. So it's important to understand what kind of side hustle am I best suited for? That's my encouragement to you as we wind down the year and head into a big 2020. It sounds like it's going to be big for Dave as well, and perhaps you too. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.

Today's show notes, including links to Go Last Minute and anything else that I mentioned in the episode are at www.sidehustleschool.com/1091/1091. Thanks so much. I'll be back tomorrow. As always, my name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. ♪♪ ♪♪ From The Onward Project.