> - There’s actually a profit-sharing program that I'm experimenting with. Basically if a trip you create makes money you share in the revenue. The site isn’t actually making any money right now so the details of this is still being worked out.

I would consider writing your mission more clearly on your about us. Right now I feel like you have the standard mission that is rotting America: make money

Additionally all of the "we" turns me off, because I don't think it's true. You are hoping to build a platform for community. Once you build a community you can change it to "we", but right now I don't think "we" stuff is a good choice. I think if you showed that to the ghost of Steve Jobs, he'd have yelled you out of his office. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28826437 -- worth googling for the whole thread if you don't use twitter)

If community is central to your goal, then I think you've taken a wrong approach because monetization/transactionality is an anathema to community.

> Our mission is to make traveling simple by taking the planning out of vacation planning so that you can focus on what matters the most, the experience.

What you learn from traveling pretty quickly is that the experience barely matters at all and it's the people you share experiences with that mean everything. Good people make bad experiences a great story. No people makes many experiences largely forgettable. You haven't truly felt alone until you've seen/done something really cool and worth sharing alone, and then when you get back, you realize that no one really cares about your experiences other than if they should do it themselves.

> I built this site because I am not an avid traveler, but someone who wants to travel a lot more. And as someone who doesn’t know all the best places to visit or eat or things I need to do and etc, I thought it’d be great to have place where all that knowledge is prepared for you, perhaps by local experts, in the form on an itinerary. Basically just trying to make traveling a lot simpler and maybe even more exciting.

Optimization is the enemy of just doing it, and I wholeheartedly recommend just doing it. I've had great experiences literally just walking around, that goes triple if food is a big deal to you.

Here's what I recommend before you continue all this: Pick two cities you want to visit.

Go to hostelworld and find 2 or 3 hostels in those cities with a high rating (≥ 9.0) and a large number of reviews (I recommend against American cities, America's tourism culture is hot garbage). Look at the pictures of the hostels and make sure they have a common room, generally with a communal table and couches, potentially a pool table or darts, etc. Higher capacity hostels are usually better. Your goal here is less the tourism and more to understand hostels.

Book a week, and move to each of the different 2-3 hostels over that week. When you check in ask the front desk what there is to do and eat. If the hostel is a bust, try more conventional means of finding activities/food. In the morning, eat what the hostel offers in the common room or go to a nearby convenience store/street food and eat it in the hostel common room around others. Your goal is to overhear other people talking and invite yourself into their conversations and/or directly invite people to eat with you etc. I think you fancy yourself an entrepreneur and if you do, this is a great exercise regardless of the travel.

It is totally common and acceptable to pull out your laptop in the common room and work on your website.

I think that experience is very important to informing you about travel, community, and how sane people (solo) travel vs whatever it is that Americans do.

This sites pretty good IIRC: https://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page

hostelworld, rome2rio, and couchsurfing are generally great apps. Couchsurfing had (maybe has?) a hangout feature that was fantastic. Culture trip frequently had the best curated travel content, atlas/gastro obsucra were also not bad.