Hello HN! For the past few months I've been working on this tool for creating and sharing neighborhood walking experiences.
Usually, when I have a friend in a city I'm visiting and ask them for suggestions, I end up with a list of 20+ good places, but planning visits to them feels like a chore. So I built this app to solve this problem---you create a route (which amounts to a long-ish plan for the morning, afternoon, etc.), grab a link, and send it to someone who's visiting.
Of course, it might be useful in other cases too. Some of my friends have found good use of it as a lightweight travel planning tool.
This is great. I was travelling recently and had this exact idea as planning the trip and dropping pins on Google maps sucked. I was not able to plan an ideal route and see adjustments. I wanted to make something exactly like this. There are a lot of product improvements you can make with this and I am excited for you!
My one suggestion would be to broaden the intended audience. I am not sure if this is only useful for hosts. I could just want to do this as a traveler who has read a bunch of suggestions online.
Thank you! That's a good point - admittedly, as time goes by, I hear a lot of people who might be interested in this for planning their trips. I just didn't think of that initially, but I think I should incorporate that further.
I'd be really happy to make any improvements or changes that will make it easier for you to try the tool for your next trip. So feel free to drop me an email at david <at> davidovic.io :)
Good to see idea one hesitates to implement gets implemented. If it wasn't for money I'd implement this already (poor me). May I ask do you intend to make money from it? If so how :)?
I'd also add any type of transportation too. It could replace Google My Map if it also provides tools like layer for arbitrary group of things.
Multimodal transportation is something I've been thinking about as well. The original idea was to focus on neighborhood exploration via walking. But I'm wondering if allowing folks to put in biking or car (e.g. for an Uber from point A to point B) might open more use-cases.
I agree that stuff like arbitrary layers and things like that is really cool, but this was hard to implement as-is :) I want to wait and see how people might react to this set of features before I add more.
As for monetization, I think it's too early for that - right now, I want to see if this is something that people really want and would use. There's always the option of promoting local businesses in various ways, or paid plans for additional features that might get built along the way. But the prerequisite for all that is that this fills some need.
this is so cool. I love walking tours myself, so it's cool to see someone developing a website like this.
I normally join as many walking tours when I visit a new city.
Thanks! It was around 5 months of full-time work, give or take. However, this is end-to-end i.e. idea to finished product, so the time includes UX and UI work (which then again includes user testing and research) as well as coding, figuring everything out technically (I used a tech stack I wasn't the most proficient with), devops, soliciting feedback along the way and iterating, etc.
11 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 36.1 ms ] threadUsually, when I have a friend in a city I'm visiting and ask them for suggestions, I end up with a list of 20+ good places, but planning visits to them feels like a chore. So I built this app to solve this problem---you create a route (which amounts to a long-ish plan for the morning, afternoon, etc.), grab a link, and send it to someone who's visiting.
Of course, it might be useful in other cases too. Some of my friends have found good use of it as a lightweight travel planning tool.
Eager to hear what you all think!
FYI the `<article>` panel doesn't scroll on firefox
I'll take a look and fix the scrolling issue - thanks for the heads-up!
My one suggestion would be to broaden the intended audience. I am not sure if this is only useful for hosts. I could just want to do this as a traveler who has read a bunch of suggestions online.
Best of luck!
I'd be really happy to make any improvements or changes that will make it easier for you to try the tool for your next trip. So feel free to drop me an email at david <at> davidovic.io :)
I'd also add any type of transportation too. It could replace Google My Map if it also provides tools like layer for arbitrary group of things.
I like it!
I agree that stuff like arbitrary layers and things like that is really cool, but this was hard to implement as-is :) I want to wait and see how people might react to this set of features before I add more.
As for monetization, I think it's too early for that - right now, I want to see if this is something that people really want and would use. There's always the option of promoting local businesses in various ways, or paid plans for additional features that might get built along the way. But the prerequisite for all that is that this fills some need.