Zachary Cohn had the idea for Amazing Airfare after he was able to sniff out a roundtrip flight from New York City to Johannesburg for $270.
He booked that trip for himself, and then started finding similar deals for friends who eventually started paying $8 per month for the service. By the time Cohn finally took that trip to Johannesburg nine months later, his little hobby had grown into a full-blown business — and he was ready for his exit.
Cohn said he quietly started shopping the business around to his network a few months ago, and Mike Grabham, the director of Startup Grind Seattle, eventually bought Amazing Airfare for an undisclosed sum.
Cohn wouldn’t give away too many details on the deal, other than to say the price was “enough to be worth it.”
The whole project wasn’t that unusual for Cohn, a longtime techie who has launched his fair share of ventures, from Amazing Airfares to a parkour organization and the Hacker News Seattle Meetup. He has worked with Startup Weekend, was a partner at product design consultancy LIFFFT, founded the consultancy Wonful, and is now an innovation specialist with 18F, the organization created by the Obama administration to try to inject some startup mojo into the U.S. government.
Cohn is careful not to call Amazing Airfare a startup. He says it was a side project from the beginning, and the two shouldn’t be confused.
“I had a suspicion that people would be interested in this kind of service,” Cohn said. “I knew I liked finding these things. … But the intention was never to make it a full-time gig.”
The first iteration of Amazing Airfare was just a spreadsheet full of email addresses and phone numbers. If you paid Cohn $8 every month, he would keep an eye on all his favorite deal sites and let you know when he found a particularly good fare.
He found one trip from Boston to Iceland for $99, another round trip ticket from Seattle to Panama City, Fla. for $340.
Cohn says the cheap tickets aren’t hiding anywhere in particular. You just have to watch constantly since they usually expire within a couple of hours.
Amazing Airfare eventually got a real website as the service grew to about 200 subscribers. But Cohn could tell he wasn’t pushing hard enough to grow the business. He had just moved to Washington, D.C. for his job with the federal government, and the reality was he just didn’t have the time Amazing Airfare needed.
“If I wasn’t going to keep building it, I thought maybe I could give I to someone else to keep building,” he said.
