Meet Flown: an aviation hobby site for both aviation geeks and common air travelers

👋  First, check out this site and complete a full flow if you could. Then come back here for the story.

01. The hobby

I’m an aviation geek, especially when it comes to commercial airliners. I’m always fascinated by 3 wonderful components of this:

  • The engineering marvel over the decade across the industry

  • The beautiful graphic design and branding of all airlines worldwide

  • The feeling of flying and visiting new and old places

02. The project

I started out with a simple idea: What if I could turn my physical mini airport into a digital one where I could keep adding more over time, and what if I could make this accessible to everyone (both the enthusiasts and the average air travelers who wish to learn more about aviation)?

I gave myself a full weekend to get started and then kept going. Here’re the key steps in my process:

  • Early whiteboard sketches

  • Early brainstorming with ChatGPT to riff on concepts and high-level approach

  • I started building the site with Codex to get the feel end to end.

  • Separately, I used ChatGPT latest Astra model to generate the aircrafts graphic with various combinations of plane types and airlines’ livery. This was very fun but it needed quite of bit of creative supervision from me on some technical details. For my very MVP version, I had a small catalog which will expand over time.

  • I brought everything together in Codex, pushed to GitHub, connected to Supabase and finally deployed on Vercel.

03. The growth tactics

As a growth designer, thinking about how users can easily adopt and return to the app came naturally to me on day 1 and I’ll continue to refine it.

🔎 Identifying the right aircraft and airline:

  • Frictionless way to get started via a simple madlib.

  • Inclusivity: for users without planes knowledge, they can take a quiz to find out (educational value).

✈️ Plane revelation: early aha moment

  • Visual reaction

  • Educational value

  • Linkage to aircraft manufactures and airlines could bring in future opportunities

🛫 Airport revelation: key aha moment and value delivery

  • True aha moment as user gets what this site is all about now

  • As user starts building on their own, they’ll be more invested and likely to return (endowment effect).

  • The fun game-like interaction creates a sense of a mini world where user could customize further.

  • Account creation nudge to save the airport building process (activation)

  • Growing the airport as users take more trips: retention tactic to keep bringing user back

04. Future implementation

As I continue to push this site further in my free time, here are some of things I’m considering:

  • Adding more planes with more airline livery options to the catalog. In the meantime, user can request new combinations directly to me (balancing resource and keeping user engaged).

  • Adding more aircraft variants to satisfy the aviation geek. For example: Airbus A350-900 vs Airbus A350-1000

  • Adding customization for the airport assembly so users can make them their own (terminal designs, day vs night, vehicles, etc). In the long term if I plan to commercialize this app, I could use this lever to monetize.

  • Adding sharing functionality such as family account so everyone can add their own planes (better retention due to higher frequency of travel), group leaderboard as a way for users to compete (virality effect).

  • Taking requests from users to improve the app, including you!