Is "better design" or the agony feature really a sustainable competitive advantage? You're clearly on to something, but why can't someone just copy what you have?

When competition makes more than half of their revenue from ads, shutting off that revenue source by copying that UX and striking out pages of advertisements isn't very economically viable.

I have feature suggestions for hipmunk. I really hope you, or some other flights search site brings these two things:

1. Find cheapest flights between two countries (country->city, city->country, country->country). Some people don't mind traveling a little just to reach the airport from where they can find cheaper flights.

2. Bypass stopovers which levy transit visa. You can easily find my location so you can identify places where I will need to get transit visa even for stopovers and give me option to ignore flights with those stopovers.

> 1. Find cheapest flights between two countries (country->city, city->country, country->country). Some people don't mind traveling a little just to reach the airport from where they can find cheaper flights.

You can sort of do this right now with comma-separated airports, like this: http://www.hipmunk.com/#!LHR,LGW.BOS,Next+Month.Next+2+Month...

The only restriction is that the airports must be in the same time zone and there's a cap on how many you can list for a single location (maybe 5?)

I recommend asking about how important a role his bizdev played in prep for launching the site as well as signing on partners thereafter. The amount of hustle it took to get us in the door with OTAs/airlines at first is not something I see in many of my startups.

Why don't YOU tell us :) I'd love to hear about it. Bizdev/Marketing is still really undervalued in startup land.

Heh. I did none of the bizdev, which really made the difference with getting hipmunk off the ground (and is a unique startup proposition). If you wanna know about my marketing/PR brandbuilding, just watch my class on Making Something People Love: http://generalassemb.ly/start/fundamentals-of-entrepreneursh...

Emmett Shear of Twitch just suggested the same thing. Thanks Alexis. I think I'll make this the focus of the interview, and ask the other questions posted here towards the end of the conversation.

It's exciting, though, because hipmunk's story shows that even more resistant industries are capable of being "hipmunked" by tenacious, smart recent-college-grads with no industry connections.

It would be a slight break from your usual dig-into-the-growth-of-the-business questions, but I'd love to hear about some of the reasons (or his thought on) why the market for flights are as insanely complicated as they are. Those kinds of understandings are surely a big part of what you need to succeed here.

What percentage of their traffic comes from paid advertising?

How much of his success with Reddit does he attribute to his success with Hipmunk?

Great question Andrew! I'd love to hear him explain:

why one way flights are often as expensive as round trips, his thoughts on couchsourced flight searching (flightfox.com, current YC batch), their monetization plans, while it is so hard to get the best priced tickets

Kind of a niche question, but I'd really like to know if Adam thinks his debate experience helped prepare him for running a startup.

how much time do they spend on SEO, and link building? How do they plan to give Google scalable, indexable content?