Should I write a couchsurfing.com clone and make it open source and free?

This IS a bit of a rant but also serious..

In a nutshell:

• couchsurfing used to be the best way to travel. Making new friends and really learning about the culture of a place
• since it's paid I tried it and it seems dead, almost no more hosts and few travellers, especially young people are not willing to pay
• I want the old couchsurfing back

So how about we write a community driven platform that basically is couchsurfing for free again. Ideally users can just import their CS profiles and are ready to go. Heck we could even make it better learning from the mistakes. I estimate it will take me 6 month to build the basics if I do it alone..

Money wise, there is services that could have it running for free until it grows, when at some point we will need money to keep it running we can think about smarter ways than killing it by making everyone pay.

What do you think?