In December 2013, Scott Keyes, a freelance journalist living in New York, stumbled onto a $130 roundtrip flight to Milan. He booked it immediately. When he came back, his friends wanted to know how to find deals like that.

The Email List That Started It All

To save himself from answering the same question repeatedly, Scott set up a free email newsletter. He'd search for cheap flights and email his friends when he found one. By 2014, word spread and strangers asked to be added to the list.

Then in April 2015, a reporter at Business Insider heard about Scott's deal-finding hobby through Facebook and wrote a story about it. Overnight, the list went from 300 to 3,000 subscribers.

Turning Free into Paid

Scott saw the inflection point. He launched a paid subscription — Scott's Cheap Flights — in August 2015. For a few dollars a month, subscribers would get premium deals not sent to the free tier.

Simultaneously, a co-founder appeared: Brian Kidwell, who ran a travel blog, sent Scott a cold email. Brian came on as co-founder in late 2015, bringing operational skills that Scott lacked.

The business scaled fast. Fewer than two years after launching the paid tier, Scott's Cheap Flights crossed $1 million in revenue.

The Evolution to Going

The business continued to professionalize. A team of "Flight Experts" joined, using both software and human expertise to identify deals before they disappeared. The model added premium and business tiers.

In 2023, Scott's Cheap Flights rebranded to Going — a cleaner name that worked across product lines beyond just cheap flights. By then, the subscriber base had grown to over 2 million.

The entire business started because Scott found one exceptionally cheap plane ticket to Italy and wanted to share the experience with his friends.