Joyent Allows Travel App Tripshare to Scale Their Business

There are a lot of tools for planning trips, but few that focus on collaboration with others. It can be frustrating to plan itineraries and book accommodations if you want to get input from others at every step of the way. Tripshare is different.

According to CEO and co-founder, Bob Dana, Tripshare “[makes] travel planning with others simple, easy, and fun,” incorporating input from others in the planning process. Tripshare combines content from various travel-related sites with tools for creating and sharing draft itineraries, letting travel organizers to create a draft itinerary, share it, get feedback, and then book the trip.

According to Tripshare’s CTO, Eric Kapke, purchasing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was the company’s plan from the beginning. They wanted their cloud provider to offer flexibility, control, and be competitively priced -- and they wanted a partner, not a host. Tripshare’s founders considered larger companies like Amazon, but quickly realized that a provider of that size wouldn’t really work with them to tailor the cloud environment to their needs. Eric said that after meeting with the Joyent team, he was confident that Tripshare could scale their business on the Joyent cloud.

He was right. Tripshare had a soft launch last summer as an iPad-only app, which grew in popularity quickly -- the app was featured as “New and Noteworthy” three times by the Apple App Store. The first time Tripshare was featured, 10,000 people downloaded it a very short amount of time. The team knew that their system could support traffic bursts like that because Joyent gives Tripshare the ability to size and resize its machines and configure its cloud stack as they see fit, using best-of-breed components that are affordable even at this early stage of the company’s development.

Joyent felt more like a business partner vested in our success, rather than a vendor. -Bob Dana, CEO and co-founder, Tripshare

Moreover, as an aggregator of aggregators, Tripshare’s cloud requirements are affected by content coming from partners such as Expedia, Viator, and Trazzler.

“As that content grows, we need to increase the size of the machines. Joyent has great tools for sizing and resizing machines,” said Eric. “With Joyent, we value the fact that we’re in charge of our own machines and our own destiny.”

Another factor that Tripshare finds useful is the availability of Joyent instances with MongoDB pre-installed. “Because Joyent did the work of configuring those nodes, it saved me a few days of work,” explained Eric. “When we were under the gun to get our first system live and to market, that time was extremely valuable.”

As a small company, Tripshare also valued the fact that Joyent had “real people on the other side,” according to Bob Dana. “One reason we picked Joyent is that we really liked the people we were dealing with,” said Bob. “Joyent felt more like a business partner vested in our success, rather than a vendor.”

Tripshare will soon be launching at a commercial level, and has plans to launch across other platforms and web browsers, including Android and iOS. Check their blog soon for launch details! We’re excited to see them grow, and look forward to our continued partnership.

For a more detailed case study on how Tripshare uses Joyent, check out this case study.



Post written by Hannah Simon