Vjago

Some months ago I released Vjago MVP with a usable UI but honestly not a nice one. So I decided to give it a facelift and I also decided to design it mobile-first, as most of the users are using Vjago on mobile, considering it's a trip planning app, it makes sense! Here some of the changes:

🧭 Bottom navigation in the Trip page to navigate through Overview, Map and Photo Gallery (coming soon) pages

🗺️ New Trip Map page

↔️Horizontal scroll for My Trips in home page (Netflix-like)

✔️ Filter for My Trips in home page

The horizontal scroll layout is very handy on mobile and takes less than half a screen, allowing me to add more things in the home page, most likely I'll add the Explore Trips feature that lets the user search among the public trips from other users.

Take a look at https://app.vjago.com and let me know what you think!

Vjago must definitely be a social beast, yet I didn't have all the features in mind and the business model either, but everyone wanted to share their own trips on social, together with pictures.
Problem is, I don't use social networks, so my girlfriend Suzana to the rescue. She decided to take over the social duties, a few hours later the Instagram page was born https://www.instagram.com/vjagotravel/
together with Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Everything needs a name. It's not easy to find one and it's even more difficult to find an affordable .com domain for it, I knew this problem since I named my other project Atlas... now find a cheap domain for it and fight the SEO war!
So I started the name hunting together with NameCheap monster-mode domain search. I ended up with Vjago [viàgo] https://vjago.com. "Viaggio" in Italian means trip and "via" and "go" recall a path, a movement. I added the "J" to make it more exotic, I think of Asia, India, my girlfriend feels it nordic, Scandinavian, well OK still exotic. So let it be Vjago.

I periodically run an "ideas review", I just go over a kanban and move ideas into dead, on-hold, running, to-launch buckets and I rank them based on potential/interest. Parenthesis (it's emotional to look at past ideas and remember all the dreams you had about it, plans to make it a 1M$ company, business cases, ideas for the name, I may drop a tear, sigh).
Well sorry, all of this to say that the trip planning app was ranking very high in terms of potential and interest and I really felt an intergalactic as***ole ignoring it, probably it was envy towards other ideas I was working on. Mmm envy of myself, sounds crazy.
I spoke with my girlfriend (main supporter of the app) and some friends and all of them agreed that I needed to go forth.
I can't trash this idea!

I didn't work much more on the app, I just added some features like the possibility to upload a trip picture and a "Share this trip" button, some styling here and there and some polishing. But still, I didn't want to work on this full time. I forced myself to be disinterested in this idea, I kind of snubbed it. Actually for no logical reason.

Honestly? I created this app (it didn't have a name yet) just for myself, with no intention to make it publicly available or dream to make a startup out of it.
So what happened? Well, I sent the link of the app to my friends to share my trip with them, that was a tech and cool answer to the question "Hey where the hell are you today?" and it was useful to keep my parents' calls to a minimum! All of these early adopters said immediately that it was a very useful app, they wanted to use it for their own trips, so they did.
They pushed me a lot to add features, thinking about a public release, etc. I was really excited that they liked it and found it useful, it was the first validation of the MVP, but on the other side I was working on another project to launch as a B2B startup, so I put the trip planning app aside.

In a few coffee and Singha-fueled days, I created an MVP putting together Firebase, Vue, and Vuetify: here it is a mobile-first web app.
It was my first project to truly follow the MVP process, the home page was a list of trips and a button to create one. Inside each trip, a list of places with geolocation (from Google Places Autocomplete), dates and cost, then the trip duration and cost were calculated automatically (what a feature!).
It's impressive how handy Firebase is when it comes to apps like this, you just need a couple of Firestore collections, Cloud Functions and your favorite auth providers: work is done!

Soon after resigning from my job, I started my nomad period in South-East Asia. I was inspired by many nomads and makers, first among all I must say is @levelsio, whose adventures I read some years ago!
Well, at some point during my wandering, I felt the need to track down my itinerary, I wanted to remember the places I visited and to plan the next to visit, I also needed to track the main expenses (you know... you're always on a budget), but I didn't find what I wanted: a simple and easy to use mobile app. Well, no drama, of course, I was more than happy to start a new project and have another idea in my entrepreneur ideas-drawer.