Show HN: GridTravel – A community based travel app for users to share routes (gridtravel.app)
My co-founders and I have been building GridTravel, a free iOS app for planning and sharing travel routes with turn-by-turn GPS nav. We just launched yesterday after App Store approval.
We're three 21-year-old cofounders and best friends since middle school. We built GridTravel after years of frustration navigating new cities on every trip we took together.
The idea: most people either search Google for "top 10 places to visit in…" lists or go on social media to get inspiration on where to go. GridTravel is built around user-generated routes — actual paths someone walked, that you can follow, save, download, and discover from other travelers. Users also have the ability to create private routes and collaborate with their friends.
Tech stack: Mapbox (Nav SDK + maps), Supabase (auth, DB, storage), and Swift. Native iOS for now, Android coming soon.
Our two real cost drivers are Mapbox Search (hit when users create routes) and Mapbox Navigation (hit when users use live navigation). Both have free tiers, then scale with MAU. We launched fully free to remove the barrier to entry. Revisiting pricing in Year 2 once nav costs start burning a hole in our pocket.
Current state: we're in the UGC cold-start hole. The app's value scales with route density in a given city, but route density requires users, who require routes. Classic chicken and egg. Our current plan: 1. Manually seed 25–30 routes per city, starting with 5-10 priority cities where we have personal networks rather than spreading ourselves thin. 2. Short-form content as the primary social channel (TikTok, reels, shorts). Doing A/B testing: whether route walkthroughs convert better than informational/skit videos. 3. Partnering with micro-influencers in those cities (5k-50k following) for in-app routes plus cross-posts on their channels
Curious what HN thinks. Especially anyone who's shipped a UGC product. What worked for you on cold start? What do you wish you'd done differently? Happy to answer any questions about the app, costs, etc.
App link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gridtravel-local-routes/id6762...
31 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 63.0 ms ] threadThis is almost 1:1 with a project we worked on several years ago. Unfortunately it never launched - founder ran out of money. It was one of my favourite projects we’ve done and I genuinely believed in the concept, so I was sad we couldn’t see it come to fruition. But glad someone else is giving it another go!
Without giving away anything confidential, I can say your cold start plan is very similar. Can’t say it’s a good or bad plan because we never saw it executed in practice… but it’s not unreasonable!
I think distribution and stickiness will be a challenge. Even if you get enough content that users will have a great first experience, most people don’t travel that often, so getting them to come back regularly won’t be easy.
Best of luck - would love to see this succeed!
I like the idea of exploring what others had found before. Maybe it doesn't need to be gear towards just travel but also this gives an opportunity for locals to explore places they've never knew before too?
I've also recently launched a walking app - made for myself but thought others would enjoy too. I had added an anonymous collective walk counter which encourages others to keep walking.
BTW, Mapbox does give sponsorships to projects/apps for displaying how their product is being used so once you get to a certain level you could submit a form for it. I know this project was sponsored by them: https://gpx.studio/
Here is my project if you are interested to checking out. Feel free to take any feature you find in there for your app. https://github.com/walktalkmeditate/pilgrim-ios
Some ideas I had back then on the business side of things - you could explore getting travel influencers on board to market it and create their own custom itenararies. Then you can also connect to booking websites to earn income and give commission shares to route creators.
I would forget UGC for a long while yet. Just commit to seeding/curating routes yourselves. If you want to involve influencers, generate the routes based on their travel blogs or comments and then link back to them. Saves them doing any work on what will be a wasteland app to start with.
Custom points would be great too, sometimes the search feature built in couldn't find the locations I was looking for.
- not providing examples how the app works makes me not inclined at all to download this
- not mentioning anything about being limited to US makes me angry to have wasted my time trying to even try this out
How do you guarantee it?
I'd suggest forgetting about UGC for now and focusing on routes that have a real identity behind them. When my wife and I visited Japan recently, we watched several travel vloggers to see how each one planned their exploration of different neighborhoods. We picked the ones whose style resonated with us and tried to replicate their approach.
Imagine if, for a given area in a city, you could offer an exploration route tied to a specific travel creator and how they actually did it. It would feel more authentic. There's a personality behind the route, not just an algorithm. You could pull from travel videos on YouTube, use AI to extract the route and key stops, and then attribute it: "This route was done by [vlogger]." That gives you the authenticity of UGC but with real curation.
It's also a practical way to scale up your route library without burning a hole through your pocket.