Introducing Walk 🎈

Launching an app to discover monuments near you

Landing page, not made simple

Before the story of Walk, here’s a bit about me: I’m Joshua, a 17 y.o. french student that started web-development at age of 8. Last year, I moved to another city and that’s how the idea of Walk came to me… Now I let you discover the whole thing!

The Problem — Last year 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

Our Solution — Based on multiple providers, our app generate a path using our algorithm Pathfinder with monuments according to the time you have

Tech Stack — At first, we started by making an hybrid mobile app but it wasn’t feeling good so we moved to a web-app capable website. It now runs with NodeJS (I recommend you adding the app to your homescreen to make it fully works)

Source: GIPHY / Silicon Valley HBO

Strategy — No marketing strategy (in fact, we started thinking about premium features), we don’t make money with Walk. The only thing I’m sure is that Walk is free and the core will remain free

The mistake isn’t releasing something bad. The mistake is to launch it and get PR people involved. You don’t want people to start amping up expectations for an early version of your product. The best entrepreneurship happens in low-stakes environments where no one is paying attention, like Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard. — Eric Ries.

First step into building Walk

Timeline — 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 and it’s official (quite, we missed 3rd March 😁)… Walk is launching today, on 8th March 2018 Walk is finally in half-private beta! 🎉🎉🎉

Walk app - Search monuments near you

Psst: We have a public roadmap in which you can participate, join us!