Plaan

People now have access to the beta application. We set up an initial paywall of 2€ per plan. This proved to be a significant obstacle.

We received feedback that users who have had no contact with the solution, do not specifically understand what it is precisely that they're getting for the purchase. This valuable feedback meant that we had to either improve our introductory material or allow free demos.

In today’s tech world, it seems to be impossible to get the trust of users without free trials or demos, so we chose the latter option. We’ll be working on our introductory material regardless as well.

The beta application required just a little more work before it could handle the users. We couldn’t wait, however, to let everyone know what we’ve been working on, so we made our landing page public.

We received around 200 email sign-ups from announcing the solution in various travel & digital nomad Facebook groups. As the groups are mostly location-based, we targeted the ones where we’d actually been ourselves in order to get a deeper connection with the audience and not come off as just promotion. We used pictures of ourselves (no branding) in the locations and told our personal story.

It’s super exciting to have the legal entity officially registered. We are handling pretty sensitive user personal data. Having an LE as the data processor makes things easier and safer, both for us and our users.

The digital privacy world is super complex and it took a lot of energy to get us properly set up for this (thank you so much Henrik for being a huge help here).

This step also meant setting up our new hosting infrastructure to ensure that our data was processed & stored within the EU.

The new and improved route generation algorithm has numerous significant improvements.

Firstly, the places suggested to the user are now personalized. Each user has a preferences profile, which is initially created by the on-boarding process and later adjusts with how the user interacts with the application. When multiple users are involved in a plan then the preference profiles are aggregated so that the group would receive the most suitable suggestions.

Secondly, the routes are built to provide an enjoyable exploration experience. For walking plans, the places chosen for the route tend to be closer to one another. For road trips, however, the algo aims to evenly distribute the stops to avoid having to hop in-out of the car too often or have an unproportionally lengthy drive. Naturally, the route provided is still the most optimal (fastest) between the places, unless a place wouldn’t be open by the time the user got there.

Finally, the new data aggregation & route calculation is more compute-efficient, improving the user experience and lowering the cost per plan.

Now that the application & the algo itself started taking shape, it was time to make the entire package appealing to the eye and easy to use as well.

Luckily we knew an amazing web designer, Kärolin, to help us with this. Some things you just can't DIY as a developer...

What we had at this point was a simple web app with a very simplistic generation algo. The back-end, however, was solid. I took the time to build a strong & scalable infrastructure with +95% test coverage so that the development process would be exponentially easier, not harder, down the road.

The launch got praises from friends & family, but there was room for LOTS of improvement. The biggest shortcoming was the algorithm itself. What good is an itinerary generator if it doesn't lead you to places you'd actually enjoy visiting?

Time to rewrite the algo...

After months of traveling, me (Robert) and my wife (Andrea) recognized how much time & energy it takes to build a detailed sightseeing itinerary for the day. The problem solver & developer in me saw how this could be automated & optimized, rolled up his sleeves and got coding!