The Idea
At 18, Alex Slater dropped out of college in London, bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco, and arrived with no job, no money, and no professional experience. He met his co-founder over Chipotle bowls after matching on Y Combinator's co-founder platform, and between them they had $3,000 to spend. That $3,000 became QUITTR, a digital-addiction app built in ten days.
Two years and millions of downloads later, Slater kept running into the same friction from the other side of his own success: he was flying constantly, and every booking meant the same twenty fields, the same 2008-era interfaces, the same handoff from Google Flights to Skyscanner to some airline checkout that timed out. He had spent his whole career making consumer apps feel like one tap. Travel had somehow never got the memo.
His diagnosis was blunt. Flight search wasn't a pricing problem. It was an interface problem, and nobody with a consumer-app growth playbook had bothered to attack it. This was the beginning of Soar.
The Execution
The lesson?
Slater didn't find cheaper seats. He found the same inventory everyone else sells and wrapped it in an interface built by someone who ships consumer apps in ten days. The category was full of incumbents who thought they were in the pricing business. He shipped 14 days after buying the domain, ate a public thread full of bug reports, and had a quarter of a million dollars in bookings a month later. Legacy travel sites had two decades to make booking feel like ordering an Uber. Nobody bothered, so a 21-year-old with a growth playbook did it in a fortnight.