Travel Rebates: Earning 180K Monthly

Massive data:

Started in 2015, rebuilt in 2016. Already have an app, community, and email subscriptions with 780,000 subscribers, 110,000 downloaded users, and 550,000 followers across other media platforms. Website visits hit 1 million per month. Team: 3 full-time (one is a developer), 3 part-time.

Monthly revenue: 180,000 RMB.

After graduation I worked as a programmer and built quite a few side websites, experimenting with search optimization along the way. The one that actually took off was a travel info subscription and flight price comparison service. We doubled down on that, spent five months on promotion—couldn’t break through at all. So we rebuilt.

We split flights and travel into separate sections, found a WordPress dev via an outsourcing site for 400 RMB (at that budget in China, no one even replies). The app initially just wrapped the site’s RSS feed—pretty simple. I personally wrote the code for automated email delivery, so it ran without manual effort. (iOS development was outsourced to a freelance dev in Hong Kong.)

For cold-start growth, I literally left comments on other sites after completing orders, dropping my website’s URL in each—basically the legendary spam comments, but done manually.

I also ran ads across various media platforms for six months, hiring freelancers hourly (separately, so none turned out to be good at promotion; in the end only one remained long-term).

When the pandemic hit, we let people go. Anything we could pay per job, we stopped paying under annual contracts—cutting costs wherever possible. Now we’re waiting for travel to recover.

The biggest lesson: outsourcing marketing outside of tech is a waste of money with zero results.

Looks like just another travel-rebate blog, right?