Skift Take
Funded, lean and focused, Hipmunk can take its sweet, little time honing its product to get ready for a larger profile. Whether it ever emerges from beautiful product to major player is a very open question. There is plenty of money to be made even as a relatively small company, but Hipmunk's ambitions are huge.
Hipmunk co-founder and CEO Adam Goldstein, 25, believes his flight and hotel metasearch company can one day be larger than Kayak, and with $20.2 million in funding and revenue that has trickled in from the moment Hipmunk debuted, he thinks he has the time to prove it.
"We think we can be bigger," Goldstein says, referring to Kayak. "We think we can do it."
With Priceline closing today on its $1.8 billion acquisition of Kayak, you can picture the Kayakers reading Goldstein's boast, and breaking out in giggles as they pour their champagne (or whatever the favorite libation is over there).
After all, in the first quarter of 2013, nine-year-old Kayak reported more than 357 million user queries from desktops and mobile devices, 3 million app downloads, and $82.3 million in revenue. And, Kayak was in the black, wrangling net income of $2.1 million.
As a private company, founded in 2010, Hipmunk doesn't break out a lot of numbers, although Goldstein says the overall business, including searches, bookings and revenue, has been "more than doubling every year since we started."
Although these sorts of measures can be notoriously unreliable, Compete's U.S. numbers peg Hipmunk's monthly unique visitors at a fraction of Kayak's, and even show Hipmunk trailing rival Room 77, which debuted its core hotel-comparison shopping product in late 2011, more than a year after Hipmunk burst on the scene.
Debatable
It's hard to debate Goldstein's premise that Hipmunk can one day beat Kayak because it is an open-ended goal, there are so many variables, and anything's possible.
Then again, it is difficult to debate Goldstein about anything because he was the captain of the MIT debate team during part of his 2006-2010 stint at the school, although he doesn't try to aggressively score points when recounting Hipmunk's journey.
Goldstein was in charge of arranging the debate team's national and international travel, and he
