Project Story — VanLife

Inspiration

Van life is supposed to be freedom but freedom can get lonely.

Van lifers are everywhere, yet rarely feel truly connected. You can scroll through social platforms, group chats, and forums for hours and still feel like you’re doing this alone.

At its core, van life is social. People want to make friends, date, travel together, share stories, ask for advice, and feel understood by others living the same lifestyle. But most apps are built for stationary lives. They don’t understand movement, timing, or shared routes.

So much is left to chance - who you meet at a campsite, who’s heading the same way, whether you’ll ever cross paths again. Even planning destinations or finding help often feels isolating.

VanLife started from a simple idea:
What if van lifers had a warm, trusted digital home that moves with them?

A cozy corner to meet people, build real connections, plan journeys, and help each other along the road.

What it does

VanLife turns life on the road into something shared.

It gives van lifers a place to:

• Share the journey: post beautiful places you’ve discovered, tell real stories from the road, and pass on tips you wish you had earlier
  
• Meet people who actually fit your life: make friends or date through thoughtful recommendations based on distance, interests, destinations, and timing
  
• Stop relying on luck: see who’s nearby, who’s heading the same way, and turn chance encounters into real connections
  
• Travel together: plan trips socially, coordinate meetups, and stay connected through group chats
  
• Look back on the road you’ve taken: keep a personal record of places you’ve been and journeys you’ve shared
  
• Help each other out: offer skills, fix vans, take on small gigs, and earn while supporting the community
  

It’s not just an app for van lifers.
It’s a digital home that moves with you.

How I built it

I’ve always built my apps using SwiftUI, but I wanted to learn React Native, so I decided to give it a try with this project.

VanLife is built using React Native for the mobile app, with Supabase handling the backend and authentication.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was wanting everything to be perfect.

I kept balancing scope with speed; constantly adding new features, tweaking the copywriting, refining the user experience, and adjusting details like haptics, animations, transitions, and user flows. Every iteration made the product better, but it also made it harder to stop.

As a builder, it’s easy to keep polishing forever. The real challenge was knowing when to pause, accept that it’s good enough, and ship.

Hopefully, good enough is also good enough to win. 😁

Accomplishments I’m proud of

• Turned movement into connection, letting users see who’s nearby or heading to the same destination, meet up naturally, and travel together instead of relying on chance encounters.

• Designed an intentional, high-trust community, with verification and a subscription-only model that prioritizes quality, safety, and meaningful connections over noise.

What I learned

• Shipping matters more than perfection: polishing forever feels productive, but real learning only happens once the product is in users’ hands.

• Community products need intention, not just features: paywalls, verification, and small constraints can improve trust and behavior.

• Movement changes everything: distance, timing, and routes matter more than profiles when building for nomadic users.

• Speed creates clarity: building fast surfaced what actually mattered and what didn’t.

• Delight is in the details: copy, flows, transitions, and small UX decisions have an outsized impact on how human a product feels.

What’s next for VanLife

• VanLife Wrapped: a yearly recap showing places you’ve been, miles traveled, people you met, trips shared, chats started, and memories made on the road.

• Smarter matching & discovery: better recommendations using travel history, upcoming destinations, pace of travel, and interests to surface people you’re actually likely to meet.

• Richer destination groups: more tools inside destination chats (polls, plans, pinned meetups) so coordinating trips and meetups is effortless.

• Improved trip timelines: clearer views of where you’ve been, where you’re going next, and who overlaps with you along the way.

• Better gig discovery: surface nearby gigs more intelligently and make it easier for van lifers to help each other and earn on the road.

The focus stays the same: ship fast, listen closely, and make VanLife more useful and more delightful with every iteration.

Built With

• react-native
• revenuecat
• supabase