Tool for suggesting what to do/what to see to guests via urban walking tours

Hello hosts! Glad to be a part of this community. For the past 6 months, I’ve been working on this tool that allows you to string together places into a walk through a city/neighborhood. I think it might be a good way to recommend what to do and what to see to your guests and to be a good host.

I put together a page to summarize what it’s about: https://www.goroam.city/creator/

Here’s a direct link to the app: https://creator.goroam.city/

Here are some example walks:

The app is completely free, no ads, promotions or whatever, I just ask that you create an account to send your creations to others (purely technical/cost reasons, unfortunately, storage and serving of all that data is expensive!).

I’m willing to listen to what your thoughts are on this, and if you have the time, I’d be so grateful if you could spare a few moments and take a look.

Thank you and have a great day!!!

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Ah right, so you’re looking for beta testers?

Cool. Reckon €50 should secure my services.

So many folks come on here wanting free beta testing from hosts, but I’m sure not one of those!

JF

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Sorry if my post came across the wrong way!

The tool is always free and it can be used as it is, and I just wanted to share what I built with some folks who I think it might help in their job as hosts. If someone does find it useful, I’d be really glad, and if they feel that the tool can be made more useful for them, I’m ready to make changes based on that feedback. The “Beta” label is mostly an excuse for bugs that might appear, but the app is otherwise pretty functional!

If you don’t feel the tool suits your needs, I am bummed about that, but I’m definitely not demanding anyone’s time for free. Just offering something I enjoyed building―no strings attached :slight_smile:

I’ve just had a look at your site and I think its fantastic. I have been looking to make a series of walking tours for my town for a while. I did have a go with something I found that Google made, but they seem to have deprecated it now.

I’m very happy to “test” it for you.

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That’s awesome Paul, I’m really glad that you like it!

Saw your email and I’ve added Warwick and Leamington. You might need to do a Shift+Reload or Ctrl+Reload on the app if you don’t see them right away. If you need anything at all that would make your experience easier, I’ll be happy to help!

Will reply in more detail via email.

Cheers!

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Cool idea. Can you explain how your app is/will be monetized? Will it eventually be ad-supported or have a fee? Two versions available, a free version with ads and a subscription version without? Who owns the content once it’s created? I could have a lot of fun with this, both as a host and user, just wondering what you have planned before investing time playing with it and creating routes.

I attempted to download your ap but it said unavailable–could it be because I am on an Iphone?

First of all―thanks for the interest, @CaliforniaPuppy! That’s a really good question, and deserves a bit of a longish answer. It’s funny because I think I’d ask the same in your position really, because stewardship of data is something I personally think about a lot when I use stuff online.

To give some context, this app is my side-project within a small company (just a few of us, really). We’re doing some other semi-related stuff and that is an income stream, currently. As for this app, we haven’t decided on the monetization model yet, as we still don’t know if it’s actually helpful to people. I envision it as free for individual hosts, always, and in any case, no content created now will be subject to any additional requirements down the road. But that’s just my word, so:

Whatever content you create, you’ll be able to take it with you. Admittedly, I haven’t built automated tools for that yet (that would be a ton of work!), but I’ll be happy to manually export whatever content you or anyone else have created, send it to you, and delete it from our servers if you so wish. I personally strongly dislike this model where someone holds peoples’ content hostage and/or uses it as leverage to start asking for money, or abuses their users’ trust in other ways (we see this happen a lot nowadays, unfortunately). We would of course store a copy of your content that you can edit, access and delete at all times, and also we would serve this copy to other people you share your content with. But the rights to it remain fundamentally yours.

I’d definitely like to hear what you think about this. And I’m open to discussion about how to do this and protect the interests of users who create content.

If you have concerns and want to talk more, feel free to send me a direct message and we can chat. I want to do my best to earn your trust so you can take the app for a spin, because I’m pretty sure you’ll like it :slight_smile:

So sorry! I’m not exactly sure what happened―did you try opening the direct link to the app in my first post (https://creator.goroam.city)? Do you remember what the message said exactly? One thing I forgot to mention is that the website is really not usable on phones due to a very small screen space (can’t show the map with a sidebar at all), although it should work in some capacity. So can I please ask you to try opening the app again from a computer? If you encounter any problems or if you want me to give a quick tutorial on how to use it, feel free to send me a private message. Thanks so much for your interest!

Something you COULD add to your app: Make the walking tours easily printable on 1 A4.
Why? Not all cities in the world are safe enough for guests to be walking around with their cellphone.

That’s a really good point. Thanks for the suggestion―I’ll add it to my to-do list and hopefully get it done soon!

Think I got it working, must have been the link. So far, looks great.

I’m so glad that you like it, Dave! If you need anything at all from me regarding the app, let me know here or via private message, I’ll be happy to help. And if you create a route, I’d love to see it and I’d be happy to feature it on our website (if you agree, of course) - feel free to send me the link :slight_smile: Cheers!