It’s a widely accepted truth in the startup world that the idea you start out with often isn’t what you end up building in the long run. Hopper is the perfect example: The Cambridge-based company, which was founded in Canada in 2007, originally built a system that allowed users to find inspiration for where to travel by searching certain keywords and phrases—like skiing, surfing or wine tasting. What the team quickly realized is that most people simply didn’t know what to type in. But what they were interested in was finding the cheap flights. Meanwhile, Hopper had been aggregating a massive amount of data from airlines. So the company swiftly decided to shift gears from travel discovery to hone in on helping users figure out the best times to fly. It's an interesting case study for anyone who's ever considered looking for startup jobs.
“We basically stumbled upon the new focus by accident,” co-founder and CTO Joost Ouwerkerk told me in their Kendall Square office. “That doesn’t mean I don’t eventually want to go back and take a crack at what we were working on before. I think there’s potential for something valuable there. But it’s a complicated problem that we don’t know how to solve yet. We’re such a small company, and we needed to think about our focus. So we made a decision to run with something that seemed guaranteed to be useful.”
Because Hopper needed to ensure it offered up-to-date information, the company sought out to strike an agreement with global distribution systems to get access to their data. It took two years to close those deals, but it was well worth the effort. Now, armed with greater visibility into flight search activity, Hopper can see roughly a billion flight prices searched by real people in real-time. And there’s a bigger picture. As of now, Hopper has accumulated three years of flight search results. In fact, Ouwerkerk told me that Hopper currently receives information on several billion flight prices every year, adding to an archive that already contains of trillions and trillions of flight prices. The more data they pull in, the easier it’s becoming for them to identify trends and strengthen their predictive model. In other words, letting users know what they can expect to pay for a trip—based on the historical data for that particular destination—so they know the ideal time to buy tickets.
"That doesn’t mean I don’t eventually want to go back and take a crack at what we were working on before."
The mobile app, which Hopper just launched in late January, advises you whether to book now or wait for a better price, provides a timeline of how prices tend to trend, and alerts you if prices drop or are expected to rise.
On some routes, you can save 40 percent or more over the best price from your initial search, according to the company. About 40,000 new trips are being monitored on the app every week, and it’s on track to reach 1 million downloads by the summer.
Needless to say, it’s been quite a ride for Hopper since the company brought their headquarters from Montreal to Cambridge in the summer of 2012. The startup is now backed by $22 million in venture funding from several investors, including Atlas Venture and Brightspark Ventures. And Hopper could very well be raising more in the near future.
So what’s it like to work at a startup that makes a hard pivot? I spent an afternoon in the Hopper office to find out.
The office culture
Hopper is located in the Kendall tank and boiler building, which also houses Hack/Reduce. At the entrance is a cozy sitting area, and the rest of the room is an open layout. There are no offices whatsoever, and several conference rooms. At the kitchen to the left, employees will often sit down to lunch together (while I was there, they were enjoying some leftover Indian takeout). And there are two rotating taps as well.
As for the culture, Ouwerkerk stressed that it’s very casual, collaborative and spontaneous. Social activities are planned on the fly, not as a forced effort to build camaraderie. In other words, someone will post an idea in their chat room—“kayaking tomorrow, who’s in?” It’s as simple as that.
Every morning at about 10:30 a.m., staff will congregate for a daily standup meeting. During this time, they'll talk about what they worked on yesterday, what they’re working on now, and their dependencies on other people—what they need from their co-workers to accomplish those tasks.
The hiring process entails multiple steps. After an initial test to screen applicants’ capabilities, candidates are brought into the office for a couple hours to meet the core team members. Everyone who is hired must get the final approval from CEO Frederic Lalonde. Unsurprisingly, most of the people who work at Hopper have the travel bug, and are passionate about seeing new places. Right now, Hopper is hiring for a couple software engineering positions. But director of communications Brianna Schneider tells me that many of Hopper's employees applied when there was no opening—they simply reached out because it was a company they were eager to work for, and happened to have applicable, relevant skills that lined up with Hopper's mission.
The people
Joost Ouwerkerk, co-founder/CTO
According to Ouwerkerk, Hopper’s current model all started with an experiment. The team put up Web pages where users could enter their origin and destination, and see a historical overview of that route. The idea was just to drive interest in the core travel discovery site. But what they noticed is that people were far more engaged with the historical overview feature.
For the first three years, Hopper only consisted of the three founders. But once the company received the Atlas investment, it was obvious that they would need to grow.
“We realized Montreal wasn’t the best place to do that,” Ouwerkerk told me. “There was a lot more talent here in Boston. We flirted with the idea of San Francisco, but that would have put us much farther away from our Canada office, and also our family and friends. In terms of recruiting, it would be extremely competitive. And between Kayak, TripAdvisor, and other local companies Boston is actually a pretty important hub for travel tech, so it made a lot of sense.”
Now, there are about 25 people on the Hopper team, with about five in Montreal and the rest working in Cambridge.
Ouwerkerk tells me that he frequently uses Hopper himself, because that’s what drives him to determine what they can do the improve the user experience.
“I actually think the site is going to devolve,” he said. “We’ll be putting less and less effort into it. The research team is continually looking for new ways we can use predictive analytics to help people find better flights, figuring out more patterns to provide interesting answers. There’s a lot more we can do with destination discovery, dateless search, notifications and alerts.”
Patrick Surry, chief data scientist
When Surry started at Hopper two years ago, he was on the research team. And in large part, the company’s pivot can be attributed to his work.
He originally found out about Hopper when he saw an article in the Boston Globe. Having studied weather prediction modeling—and worked at a data mining company—it turns out his skills were a great fit for what Hopper was trying to do. And Surry says he was intrigued by the problem that the company was trying to solve with flight data.
“There isn’t a typical day here,” he tells me.
But basically, he spends the bulk of his time producing consumer-focused research reports that raises awareness, conducting R&D for the product, and trying to find a way to turn all the data Hopper has accrued into something that’s useful for users.
“Hopper is best at testing and measuring,” he says, “and seeing what users like on the app or the Web. Even if it’s half finished, we like to watch how users interact with it. We learn a lot that way.”
While Hopper's product may have transformed in the past couple years, Surry says that the typical user is still somewhat the same: Someone who wants to feel like they're getting a good deal, but probably isn't jetting off on a moment's notice very often. “We’re not really targeting the frequent traveler, the super savvy business traveler," he explained. "We’re aiming at someone who travels a couple times a year, maybe on a family trip.”
Alex Mozdzanowska, VP of growth
Before Hopper, Mozdzanowksa had been working as a researcher for the dean of engineering at MIT—where she also happened to attend school. She’s been with the company since December of 2013.
When I ask what her role is, she pauses for a moment, turning to Brianna Schneider, the director of communications:
“What’s my title again?”
And in that moment, Mozdzanowksa says a whole lot. Because her job actually entails a wide variety of things. She works directly with other team members on email initiatives, social media, and editorial reports. She helps to create data-driven content that will pique the interest of journalists and get Hopper’s name out there. On social, the main focus is to announce any deals that have been spotted by Hopper’s algorithms. Basically, her role can be boiled down to this: growing the user base and driving downloads.
Dakota Smith, user acquisition lead
Prior to joining Hopper, Smith had been touring Asia and doing some travel writing. He was hired by the company roughly two and a half years ago in Montreal, and moved to Boston in January.
“The one thing that hasn’t changed since the pivot is we’re still trying to get users to discover Hopper’s product,” he says. “But the type of users we’re targeting have changed, and the methods we’re targeting have changed. We’re targeting them later in the funnel. These are not people who are vaguely interested in maybe taking a trip. They’re people who are actively planning trips.”
For his role, Smith says he starts the day monitoring spreadsheets and making sure the team is hitting their targets. Then it’s time to dig into whatever data-heavy task he’s prioritizing—which could be a new A/B test, or advance targeting on Facebook.
Ultimately, he says he’d love to see Hopper revisit the concept of travel discovery.
Maggie Moran, UX product manager
When Moran applied for the product manager position at Hopper, she was working at Boston-based privacy startup Abine. She'd read about the company, and admits it was really the only company she was interested in leaving her former role for. She’s also a self-proclaimed “travel geek”—so it seemed like the perfect place for her.
“It’s kind of a product person’s dream to work on something you actually want to use,” she told me.
Before she was hired, she was given an assessment: a re-engagement campaign assignment. And according to Moran, these tests that Hopper conducts are a highly effective strategy.
“It’s without a doubt the easiest way to see if a candidate is a good fit,” she said.
Now, Moran has been here for a year and a half. And when she was hired, she brought with her Rosie—a black lab/basset hound mix that has basically become the office dog.
She spends most her day working on three different areas. A lot of her time is devoted to product strategy and direction, which she collaborates with the research team on.
“In other words: what are we building, why are we building it and who are we building it for?”
Additionally, Moran and the lead designer will work together on the app’s user experience, look and feel. The next step is to talk with developers to make sure their ideas are implemented.
Leading up to the app’s January release, Moran was focused on establishing the feature set. She spent a great deal of time on usability testing, which she says Hopper does in a bevy of different ways. In addition to using usertesting.com, the company conducted live testing—such as in the Cambridgeside Galleria. And of course, they are always monitoring comments on the app store.
“We always get a lot of feedback before releasing anything,” she says.
Right now, Moran is focused on implementing the capability for in-app booking. Currently, when users select flights, they’re sent to a different website to buy the tickets—Expedia, Orbitz, etc. Ultimately, Hopper aims to facilitate the transaction itself, which will give added assurance that there aren’t any price discrepancies. However, there are a lot of rules and regulations around becoming a ticket agency. And Moran tells me that translating that feature into a frictionless UI remains a challenge.
"It was chaotic. And also very exciting."
“The goal is to be able to book a flight in under a minute,” she says. “From your phone.”
I asked Moran what it was like to join Hopper before the pivot, and then have to adapt as the company shifted its focus.
“It was chaotic. And also very exciting. I think what we’re working on now is what we should be working on. I believe in it more, and for the time being, it’s more useful. But you know what? I think our initial idea for destination discovery will ultimately come back.”
All photos taken by Rebecca Strong.
