The real-world challenges for travel startups, as mirrored in Hipmunk’s story
Photo Credit: Hipmunk CEO Adam Goldstein, left, and co-founder Steve Huffman. Hipmunk
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, incl
