Inspiration
I love to travel but I also love to sleep.
So when I visit a new place and the hostel walking tour kicks off at 8am, I'm usually still in bed.
Too often I would leave a place without knowing much of the history because I never managed to make it to the local walking tours, nor did I want to pay €30+ for a professional city tour.
What it does
With AllTours, you can start a tour anytime, follow your own route, and learn about the city's history and hidden gems through engaging audio guides on your phone.
You can customise every aspect of a tour, choosing which landmarks to visit, which periods of history to learn about and even the personality of the tour guide.
A truly flexible & affordable way of exploring a new city.
How we built it
Initially, I created a different app called Explorer. Explorer would allow users to explore new cities and earn points for discovering new landmarks.
After little success in generating any meaningful revenue with Explorer I decided to pivot & create AllTours. Explorer was already released on the Google Play Store so I spent a few months refactoring the code to allow for AllTours to be made.
While AllTours is released on Android, it is not yet available for iOS. I've spent the last few months learning Swift & creating the iOS version which I will now release during this ship-a-ton!
Both apps are natively developed using Kotlin & Swift. I use Firebase to manage all things backend and use RevenueCat (woo!) to facilitate purchases within both the apps! (and soon, maybe also our website)
Challenges we ran into
- Dealing with AI hallucinations & responses from Open AI's models that would contain incorrect information, weird formatting, etc.
- Working with a bad iOS freelancer
- Having to ditch the aforementioned freelancer and learn how to create apps in Swift myself 😅
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Releasing my first iOS app
- Creating an Android app, iOS app, Angular website & JS backend mostly solo
What we learned
- An app should do one thing and do it well: my Explorer app tried to do so many things, it's core function was not obvious and the app overall didn't provide enough value to justify a subscription.
- Feedback is essential: I've been travelling the world for the past year and actually talking to fellow travellers has really helped shape the app.
- Delegate carefully: Initially I never delegated any work & working with bad freelancers made me more hesitant to do so. But since then, I've hired freelance devs to do specific tasks while being sure to code review all their work, ensuring that the app maintains a level of quality.
What's next for AllTours: Audio Tours
- iOS Release: Launch the iOS version of AllTours to reach a broader audience.
- Partnerships & affiliate scheme: Create an affiliate scheme and partner with hotels/hostels to promote audio tours in specific cities to tourists.
- Enhanced Tour Customization: Allow users to further customise tours with tour themes, remove/add specific audio tracks, and support more languages.
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