We’re a group of Chicago based travel writers, photographers, and filmmakers that are experimenting with different ways to help people explore their city. We are currently creating a weekly series of mini-city guides focused on Chicago. As we continue to evolve and learn, we’re going to be sharing our experiences creating Project Nande.

This is Volume 2. Here’s a link to Volume 1

Re-Introduction and Recap

This is our second post since deciding to document our experience creating Project Nande.

Our first post focused on what motivated us to start Project Nande, and our philosophy on city exploration.

The ideas laid out in that first post inform pretty much everything we do — whether it’s a question about design, how we develop content, or strategic decisions — all of that is done through that philosophical framework we’ve adopted.

And with the start of any project, I think that’s the most important thing to establish. As projects grow, more people will get involved, and if they can all rally behind a shared philosophy, then it can lead to something beautiful and incredibly powerful.

Project Nande: A Brief History

For this post, I want to focus a bit more about the people behind Project Nande, the history of how we came together, and our vision going forward.

March 2015 — July 2015

I’ll start with myself. I’m Andrew Tran, and if I had to put a label to it, then I suppose I’d be the founder of Project Nande.

Like a lot of projects, there’s not a single “aha” moment that gets things going. It’s an accumulation of small events that lead to something bigger, and our story isn’t any different.

I guess this project began sometime in March 2015 when I decided one day to take my camera around Chicago to write a couple guides — here’s my very first guide. The design of the guides and how the content was organized was something I wanted for myself.

At this point, I was just creating these guides for fun, and doing it solo. Then after a month or two, readership started picking up and I got e-mails from a few folks who really took to the the whole concept behind these guides.

That led to two additional collaborators— AJ Jewison and Vince Labriola. Both are native Chicagoans. By day, AJ works in marketing for a local startup. Vince is a filmmaker who spent the last few years getting his MFA in film at USC, and is now back in Chicago honing his craft.

August 2015 — Present

With two additional people involved in contributing content to the project, that led me to think that perhaps Project Nande could be something more. Here are some of the ideas I jotted down.

1. Standalone online travel publication
2. Blogging platform for travel writers and photographers to produce similar content i.e. Wordpress/Svbtle for travel writers and photographers
3. Hybrid platform/publishing platform i.e. Huffington Post/Bleacher Report/Medium for travel specific content

Pursuing any of the ideas above would mean we’d be starting a startup. Creating a consumer internet startup probably doesn’t work very well when the only people on the team are writers, photographers, and filmmakers.

So the issue before me was, how the hell do I convince developers and designers to join a bunch of non-technical folks in creating a consumer internet startup. In researching online, this is an often asked question from non-technical startup founders.

Nobody had an answer to this question, so I just decided to do my research about the travel content industry, talk to people about their city exploration habits, and write everything down in a blog post with the intention of finding developers and designers that might be interested in joining.

That blog post was Volume 1. After I wrote that, I shared it with Project Nande readers, friends, reddit, and whoever was interested.

That led to me getting an e-mail from Matthew Lui, a developer in Toronto who saw the post and was interested in adding a side project to his current gig. After a couple of Skype calls, he joined on board and is helping us build something really cool.

I’m really excited about where we’re headed, and in the next post, I hope I can share some designs for the next version of Nande and perhaps more details on which of the three approaches outlined above that we decided on.