It’s podcast time! Sten sat down in San Francisco with Gillian Morris, founder and CEO of Hitlist, a mobile app where you can list trips you dream about and then have millions of air fares scanned for you to let you know the optimal time to travel.
Gillian’s story as an entrepreneur started at a surprisingly early age of 14, when she had to raise a significant amount of money to go on a tour with a choir she was in - a trip that her parents weren’t willing to cover. This challenge led to a business plan including parakeets (genius!), planning her first ever big trip to London, and ultimately triggered her fascination with traveling the world.
During the start of her nomadic life in Paris working as an opera singer instead of taking her place in Harvard university, she received some advice from an employer - to travel as much as she possibly could. As many people do even now, she used to think that travel needs to be expensive, but through her experiences she learned that it doesn’t have to be. Since then, she’s lived and worked in 8 different cities around the world and visited some amazing locations - at a low price.
We learn about her first journey into tech entrepreneurship - a startup called TripCommon, which was probably a bit ahead of its time - and eerily similar to our Teleport Flock idea a few years later! Nevertheless, TripCommon proved to be a great learning experience and eventually brought her to start Hitlist.
She fills us in about what goes on behind the scenes in Hitlist - how it works, how data is being processed, why mobility is important when using the app, how Hitlist can do the work of searching flights for you and what are the best ways to use the app to plan your (affordable) adventures.
Of course, Hitlist isn’t done just yet - we chat about the future and what’s being planned when it comes to improvements and development of the app. And, as a bonus - being a perpetual traveler herself, Gillian shares her opinion about a few other issues she’s come across when making her way around the globe that she thinks should be solved. Have a listen - maybe you’ll get a business idea out of it!
If you're an iTunes kind of person, the episode will also be up on our iTunes podcast page.
Enjoy, let us know what you think and if you have any ideas, comments of questions about the podcast, drop us an email at feedback@teleport.org!
