Flyspy - Post Funding

Jun 2008 to Oct 2009

Founder: 1 year, 5 months

Roles: Founder, Architect, and Senior Software Engineer

Technologies: C, Java, PHP, MySQL

Overview

I'll let a TechCrunch article explain what Flyspy is.

At the Mashup Camp pre-conference dinner tonight, there were a number of demos, all of which were interesting. A non-public service that stood out was Flyspy, a search engine for airline tickets that will change the way we all travel.

Purchasing flights purely based on price has been around for a while, but the consumer has never had the power to quickly and at a glance evaluate the cheapest days to fly nor the cheapest destinations to fly to.

Flyspy reverse engineers some of the mystique associated with the airline industry and makes it extremely transparent.

Project

Flyspy is an airfare search engine, which processes millions of airfares to produce an easy-to-understand chart. Viewing the airfare market with Flyspy is a vast improvement over sites such as Expedia, Kayak, Priceline, and Travelocity.

Prior to Flyspy, an airfare search returned about a dozen results for a route (Minneapolis to San Francisco) and a date pair (departure and return date).

Searching was an endless loop of changing travel dates and city pairs to find alternate airfares.

Challenges

Airfare data is not obtained from an airline. A small number of Global Distribution Systems control the market for airfares. As a startup, striking a deal with a GDS is impossible.

Obtaining the amount of data Flyspy required was beyond the capability of any GDS. Flyspy needed, at a minimum, 200,000,000 airfares per day to be viable.

A small company in Boston, ITA Software, was pioneering technology that could satisfy Flyspy's appetite for data.

Partnering with ITA took close to 3 years. See Flyspy - pre funding.

Activities

Signed and closed a contract with ITA Software to provide Flyspy with airfare data.

Raise Venture Capital (VC) funding to start the business, hire the team, and negotiate with airlines and data suppliers.

Close contractual deals with all major airlines. Obtain agreements with GDSs to book tickets. Close agreements with travel agencies to provide customer support.

Build and launch the web site and deal with every problem that comes from a rapidly expanding startup.

Results

As the Founder, I did everything required to create a startup.

As the Architect, I designed a system that ingests and processes 200 million airfares per day.

As a Senior Software Engineer, I implemented a scalable Amazon (AWS) platform using EC2, EBS, SQS, S3, etc.