They were building a hotel price tracker when they got into Y Combinator, and dropped it during the kickoff after a partner told them to pick one thing.

“We stopped working on our hotel price tracker, and started coding Wanderlog immediately.”

They did not believe in it themselves, and it had already been built by others; sunk effort was the only argument for finishing it.

“not to mention that it’s been done before”

Before Wanderlog they ran WrapAPI, a general purpose scraping tool, and concluded a horizontal developer tool was the wrong shape of business for them.

“we found that it was rather difficult to make a business out of an unspecialized scraping tool”

Developers could build their own version, which capped both the customer base and the price, and selling it properly needed enterprise sales skills they say they did not have.

“Developers can often roll their own solution too, which limits your customer base and how much you can charge.”

The Y Combinator acceptance was their third application; the first two were rejected, and they had decided to bootstrap instead.

“Harry and I had unsuccessfully applied to YC twice before.”

An earlier calendar view was built and then removed in favour of simple place lists, before the public launch.

“we actually used to have a calendar view in the product, but stripped it out”

The product launched publicly as Travelchime in March 2019 and was operating as Wanderlog by October 2019. Neither founder has published a reason for the rename.