Walk

Project at a glance

Walk is the perfect way for you to generate a walk according to your free time. Enter your time, we do the rest. Discover monuments and other venues near you, share your walk with your friend and get back to where you started without delay.

 

Context

In 2017, I moved to another city and had two hours free. As I didn’t know this new city, I wanted to discover what was around but found no app really interesting. Walk is for all digital nomads and walkers around the world who wants to discover monuments around their current location

 

Process

At first, the app started during the Product Hunt Global Hackathon so timeline is large.
Early 2017, I shared the idea on Pitchard/Meja (not the same site/team, learn more here).
Nothing until last week of October 2017, we decided to write specifications, design a logo and a prototype (thanks Marvel App!) just before hackathon starts.
The major part comes here: 01.11, Time to hack! We started working on our algorithm (let’s call it Pathfinder) and discovered the Traveling Salesman Problem. Next, we had to learn how works the accuracy of lat/long to save in database not too much and not too less accuracy.
A week later, we’ve setup the Upcoming Page and decided we would live-tweet the progress.
Nearly half of the hackathon, we decided we had to pivot (that’s when we moved from Ionic app to web-app). At this point, we discovered a part of algorithm wasn’t working perfectly so Samuel rewrote it (at its current version).
Three days before the end of the hackathon, we registered the domain name and prepared for early access.
On 29 November we thought we were ready but accuracy of POI had nothing to do with monuments but rather shops.
Finally, on 16 February 2018, we’re finally ready (quite, we missed 3rd March 😁)… Walk is launching, on 8th March 2018 Walk is finally in half-private beta! 🎉
After few months, we decided that mobile apps would be easier to use than a webapp and launched on Product Hunt on May 3rd, 2019. We got great feedback (and few launch issues that were quickly addressed).
Finally, mid-2020, I decided to stop working on this project because I hadn't enough motivation for it. You can learn more about this on the blog.

 

Tech Stack

* MVP (webapp): HTML, CSS, JavaScript

* Node.js and APIs (Foursquare, Mapbox, Wikipedia Heritage API)

* Mobile apps: Swift, React Native