We asked Honeyglider founder, Mads Schmidt Petersen, about building an app that supports travelers in finding the cheapest flights. Mads has been an entrepreneur his entire life and has worked mostly in tech and product. He started his first social venture to help children from low-income families gain access to college. He chose Bubble because the no-code platform offers the most robust front-end and web app development.
Tell us about your app and what it does.
We want to really support travellers. The majority of Online Travels Agency, whichever permutation of the service it may be, has the passengers as the users and the airlines as their customers. They receive money from the airlines, which overtime, will drive them to focus on "pleasing" the airlines, instead of creating a better product for the passengers. The team at Honeyglider are all expats or avid travellers, so we have all had issues with finding good priced flights. It can take days and weeks. We wanted a better way.
How does your app work?
There are 2 levels to what Honeyglider does:
Short term: We have built prediction algorithms to help determine when a flight will be the cheapest. And we have wrapped this up into an Extension for Chrome. Simply install the extension and turn any Online Travel Agency (currently only working on: Expedia, Google Flights, Kayak, Priceline, and Booking) into a price prediction machine. You can search for flights as you normally would on any of the mentioned sites, our extension simply adds a prediction to the results on the sites (buy now or wait).
Long term: We want to be even more aligned with what passengers want. So, we are building a service where a passenger simply searches for the flight she wants, and pays the full amount of the cost of that flight today. We will, with our pricing predictions, hold her money, until the desired flight is at its lowest possible price, where we will buy it. We then send the passenger her tickets and her savings.
Example: The current price of the flight is: $1000The price when it is the cheapest, sometime in the future: $800 Savings in dollars: $200 (which we will return to the passenger) Savings in time: days and days
Tell us a little about your background and how you discovered no-code tools like Bubble.
I have been an entrepreneur my entire life, since I was 16 years old. I have always tried to educate myself around technology and code. It was about 12 months ago that I first started playing around with Bubble and a few other no-code tools. I saw the benefit of being able to take control of the product process, and not rely on a team of developers, for what I, myself, as the product leader could do in an afternoon. I am not an engineer, but I have worked in Product and with tech most of my career.
Why did you build your app on Bubble?
After using a few different tools, I felt like Bubble was the most robust for front-end and web apps. It would allow us to faster, iterate better, and connect directly with our Figma brand book and design system.
What have been your milestones or successes so far?
We are about to launch the extension on the Chrome Store, so we have slowly built up some traffic to the landing page. I think in terms of milestones or successes, we built a complete Online Travel Agency in one afternoon. Capable of making bookings from pretty much any airline. That was pretty cool. However, we have chosen to make the current site simpler, and focused on the extension for now.
What are your next steps or future plans for your app?
We will continue to iterate on the extension as we are improving our predictions. When our predictions are good enough, then we will launch the second version of the business, as mentioned in the "long term" description. Building apps or products is all about learning and iterating. We will not have the best product from the get go, we will continuously learn from the feedback from the users to improve the product. Little by little.
Learn more about Honeyglider: Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Pinterest | Youtube
About Bubble
Bubble is a leader in the no-code movement. Bubble offers a powerful point-and-click web editor and cloud hosting platform that allows users to build fully customizable web applications and workflows, ranging from simple prototypes to complex marketplaces, SaaS products, and more. Over 500,000 users are currently building and launching businesses on Bubble - many have gone on to participate in top accelerator programs, such as Y Combinator, and even raise $365M in venture funding. Bubble is more than just a product. We are a strong community of builders and entrepreneurs that are united by the belief that everyone should be able to create technology.
Do you want your app featured by Bubble? Reach out to us and tell us about your app. In addition to this series, we sometimes select our best apps to showcase on our website.
