Walk
The perfect way to find a walk according to your free time.
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. I didn’t know the place, wanted to discover what was around, and found no app really interesting. Walk is for digital nomads and walkers around the world who want to discover monuments around their current location.
Process
The app started during the Product Hunt Global Hackathon, so the timeline is wide.
Early 2017 — I shared the idea on Pitchard/Meja (not the same site/team, more here). Nothing happened until the last week of October 2017, when we decided to write specs, design a logo, and prototype with Marvel App right before the hackathon started.
01.11 — Time to hack. We started working on our algorithm (let’s call it Pathfinder) and discovered the Travelling Salesman Problem. Next, we had to learn how the accuracy of lat/long works to keep the database neither too precise nor too sparse.
A week later — we set up the Upcoming Page and decided we’d live-tweet the progress.
Halfway through the hackathon, we pivoted from an Ionic app to a webapp. At this point we discovered part of the algorithm wasn’t quite working, so Samuel rewrote it.
Three days before the end, we registered the domain name and prepared early access.
29 November we thought we were ready, but the POI accuracy had nothing to do with monuments — more like shops.
16 February 2018 — finally ready (close, we missed 3rd March). Walk is launching. 8 March 2018 — Walk is in half-private beta!
After a few months we decided that mobile apps would be easier than a webapp and launched on Product Hunt on 3 May 2019. Great feedback (and a few quickly-addressed launch issues).
Mid-2020, I stopped working on this project — motivation had run out. There’s a longer post-mortem on the blog.
Tech stack
- MVP (webapp): HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- Node.js + APIs (Foursquare, Mapbox, Wikipedia Heritage)
- Mobile: Swift, React Native