Fortnighter

[Editor's Note: This is a bit self serving, so forgive me.] Tomorrow I'm going to be on an Internet Week panel about side projects called, aptly, The Art of the Side Project. To get myself prepared (not really) I launched a side project I'd been working on for just over a year called Fortnighter. The idea, which came out of a random Tumblrsection with Alexander Basek, a New York-based travel writer, was to create a service that let people answer a few simple questions about their travel preferences and get a totally custom itinerary written for them by a travel writer with expertise in the area they're visiting. After joining forces with a few other friends (one silent, one Colin Nagy), we quietly launched the service last week and have been picking up some nice steam with a great Thrillist shoutout yesterday morning (as well as The Next Web and Gadling in the days before). The prices for itineraries start at $100 for a 3 day, which gets you a fully packed weekend wherever you are headed. We've bootstrapped this whole thing and managed to get it done for what I'd consider a very reasonable amount of money. Thanks to the four partner thing we've been able to distribute the workload well, allowing me to focus on the non-side projects in my life (more on that soon, I promise) while still contributing. The goal with this iteration of the product was to get something to prove the concept out the door (which I feel like we accomplished). We have some larger ideas for where Fortnighter could go, but first we all felt like it was prudent (both logically and financially) to see if there was real interest for a product like this (which seemed so obvious to us, but also seemed to antithetical to the boom in crowdsourced knowledge). Luckily we've sold enough itineraries so far that I think we know the answer to that one (yes). Anyway, just wanted to share this. Am pretty excited about it. Oh, and if you're around Internet Week, come to my panel tomorrow.