Sailbow

Getting started page
Landing page with two upcoming trips
Trip planning page overview

Inspiration

Our team has always enjoyed traveling with our friends and family. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to dream of a vacation than to actually plan it. Coordinating details and schedules in a group chat can be a challenging roadblock which prevents many group trips from happening. That’s why we created the application Sailbow which offers a simple and engaging space for trip planners to organize a travel itinerary and get everyone on board.

What it does

Sailbow is an application for planning and coordinating group trips.

Feature list:

Invite other users to the trip "crew" via email
Add crew memberships and manage roles
Create trip metadata such as the name and banner photo
Type using a rich text editor for sharing details and miscellaneous info
Send announcements
Build an itinerary
View and manage real-time, in-app notifications
Change the theme

How we built it

Since Sailbow has been a passion project of ours for a few years now, it has undergone multiple re-writes. We finally landed on the following tools and technologies:

Next.js + React application framework
shadcn + TailwindCSS - design system and styling
Vercel - application hosting and deployment infrastructure
Cloudflare - domain services
Resend - email integration
Clerk - authentication and user management
Unsplash - image search
Convex - main backend technology
- Live queries and mutations
- Library usage: @convex-dev/react-query + @convex-dev/auth + convex-helpers
- HTTP router and actions for 3rd party integrations

Finding Convex was a blessing because it made it insanely easy for us to move at the speed of light without having to worry about things like complex state logic and end-to-end type safety. Testing is a breeze; altering data in the dashboard automatically reflects in the application; no refreshes or cache invalidation required. Finally, it allows the flexibility of integrating with other services that are so common in the SAAS world. For example, we used the HTTP router to integrate with Clerk's webhook feature and actions for Unsplash image search calls.

Challenges we ran into

Figuring out the tech stack to use for Sailbow has been a multi-year challenge. We started with a React front-end and .NET backend, which worked for a while until we became frustrated coding in two langauges and two separate applications. We landed on Next.js, but subsequently went through multiple combinations of styling frameworks, databases, and schemas. Finding out about Convex really changed the game for us.

Another issue we've been wrangling with has been figuring out which features are actually useful. Anyone can create a Google doc and piece together an itinerary, so Sailbow's features need to be exceptionally intuitive and powerful in order to provide enough value to users to be enticing. We conducted a survey which identified useful concepts and informed us of which features we should prioritize.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Sticking with it and creating a beautiful looking application. Sailbow is a multi-year endeavor that started as a side project and turned into something more. Sailbow has been a joy to us to work on, and has allowed us to flex our creative muscles in our free time outside of our 9-to-5s. We are very proud of how Sailbow has turned out!

What we learned

As a team, we learned how people are currently planning group trips and empathized with the common challenges they face. This focused our efforts on designing an intuitive interface which addresses real user needs.

In terms of the tech, using Convex has introduced to us an entirely new paradigm of application development. Being real-time out of the box, we didn't encounter or even have to think about many of the usual challenges a classical architecture presents. We've learned how to leverage a tool that makes the right choices for our use case, as opposed to spending time and energy making those choices ourselves.

What's next for Sailbow

Features we will continue to work on:

Polls so members can vote on logistical details such as dates/times, budgets, locations, etc.
Expanded itinerary functionality
- Ask AI to build an itinerary for you
- Granular times for each item
- Controls for location search
- Integration with 3rd party services for hotel/vacation rentals, flights, rideshares, venues, and reviews
- PDF export + email sharing
B2B
- Target markets: travel agencies, freelance trip planners, and event planners
- Features: organizations (e.g. multi-tenancy) and expanded roles + permissions system