Three years in business was three years too long for OutTrippin, a trip planning startup which has closed its doors amid woes over investment and scaling.
The idea for the business, which was created in January 2012, was to provide a platform for consumers to get customised itineraries from travel experts such as bloggers, small tour operators and travellers themselves.
OutTrippin had three co-founders, Kunal Kalro, Indi Tansey and Joao Valente, based in Chile, New Zealand and Argentina.
By 2013 it had agreed to take part in the AngelCube incubation programme, shifting the company to Melbourne, Australia.
Following that tenure, OutTrippin decided to create a B2B service for hotels to run alongside its existing consumer-facing offering.
What could go wrong?
In a lengthy and at times extremely honest post mortem on Medium to announce the closure of the company, Kalro says outlines a number of factors behind its demise.
Of the reasons for OutTrippin's failure, Kalro says:
"That includes everything from business model failure, partial failures in team dynamics, general tiredness of doing this thing this long and go through yet another product and biz failure, a difficult investor climate in the travel industry, but most of all, the market dynamics that pushed us onto a mountain that we kept trying to ascend, only to eventually realize that that mountain was not our Everest."
Kalro also had a family bereavement to contend with whilst on the AngelCube programme.
From a business perspective, Kalro's comments on the ability (or not) of OutTrippin's revenue model are interesting.
"In the world of travel planning, finding a business model that works is like hunting for unicorns.
"It’s why there has been little to no competition to TripAdvisor on the travel planning front for the past decade.
"We’ve always had an amazing community of travel writers and bloggers and we’ve always had a concept that got people really excited.
"The problem has always been to find a business model that could scale.
"From OTAs to airlines, from content companies to hotels, we experimented for a sustainable route to create high quality expert generated travel content at scale."
Interestingly, OutTrippin's move into B2B, where arguably there is more money to made (and perhaps therefore some longer term sustainability for the company), is another area where Kalro believes the company came unstuck.
He says the move "dragged the company to a place where we dealt with slow moving behemoths and a b2b sales cycle that makes movements of glaciers look like that of a Ferrari".
Furthermore, such a shift in focus was not the "mountain we wanted to climb".
"We wanted to focus on creating more magic with our apps on the consumer side. But without the revenue from hotel partners to cover content costs, it would all come crashing down like a house of cards."
Kalro was also dismayed at the likelihood at getting investment for OutTrippin, citing an investment climate "colder than the Arctic".
"Investors are skeptical and rightfully so. Many don’t understand the space and those that do know exactly how hard it is.
"Either way, doesn’t make quite the savvy investment, does it?!
"What that means is that most travel startups are going to have to prove 10 times more than their counterparts for similar valuations and investment, all in an effort to overcome the industry bias."
This, Kalro says, "doesn’t make it impossible, just a whole lot harder".
Rather gloomily, but with obviously a huge slab of humility thrown in, Kalro says "it was the stark realization that in an effort to keep surviving as a company, we had started climbing a mountain that wasn’t our Everest".
"And that wasn’t fair to our users, our customers, our community and it definitely wasn’t fair to us.
"There is no logic in building a company whose direction you no longer believe in."
Not the happiest New Year message fellow travel startups will ever read - but an important one.
NB:Read Kalro's post mortem on Medium.