Building a start-up off a hackathon project? Maybe.

One year ago today, myself, Eleanor, Antonio and Carolina attended Sabre’s #DestinationHack: London; a hackathon aimed at re-inventing travel. We went home with three prizes — “Most Likely to Succeed”, “Best Wearable Hack” (mostly due to Eleanor’s ingenuity) and “Most Innovative Use of GetYourGuide API”.

I have been to a lot of hackathons over the last few years and was lucky enough to win some prizes at quite a few of them. This was the first time where a hackathon project was, well, not just a hackathon project! Sure, you might build something pretty cool over a weekend, but rarely do you keep working on it beyond that point — at least in my experience.

In order for a project to become something more, it takes a few things. In my opinion, first and foremost, it takes a group of people with complimentary skills that can align themselves well enough towards a common goal.

Carolina and I have known each other for years, while Antonio and Eleanor worked together for about a year at a start-up incubator.

I got to know Eleanor a few months before the hackathon via a common friend and with a little help from Twitter we ended up teaming up!

Without realising it, we ended up with one heck of a team that could develop for both the web and mobile, craft and design beautiful UIs, and think about business models. Oh and we are a pretty international bunch too; England, Italy, Isle of Man, South Africa and Cyprus are the places around the world we come from collectively.

Carolina pitching gofurther at #DestinationHack: London — you can see the flags of our countries too! Antonio is a little camera shy so he was in hiding at the time!

Over the past year, we have been hard at work — getting together on weekends and weekday evenings, all of us working towards turning our hackathon project into an actual product. You might be wondering what we’ve been working on, so here it goes; gofurther — a modern traveller’s app to discover local places and experiences whilst on holiday, recommended by locals.

gofurther provides vetted local insight and advice written by actual locals, as opposed to advice written by other tourists.

…so it looks like we might be building a start-up off a hackathon project, but only time will tell. What’s certain is that the four of us are having a great time building gofurther and learning from each other.

Not everyone on the team has a technical background, so this is a big deal!

We will be launching our iOS app in the next few weeks, with experiences for Cyprus 🇨🇾 and London 🇬🇧 (we are looking for a few more locals as we ramp up, so if you are interested give us a shout). We are hoping to enable travellers to find the hidden secrets that only the locals know, helping them have a wonderful holiday.

When our friends from all around the world are visiting the places we are from, we go to great lengths to tell them all about the fun stuff they can do and the lovely places they can visit — and vice versa, when we are visiting their parts of the world. What about all those places where you don’t know any locals though? We are building gofurther because we love travel and we want to enable people from around the world to experience places like locals!