Hey HN,My co-founders and I have been building GridTravel, a free iOS app for planning and sharing travel routes with turn-by-turn GPS nav. We just launched yesterday after App Store approval.We're three 21-year-old cofounders and best friends since middle school. We built GridTravel after years of frustration navigating new cities on every trip we took together.The idea: most people either search Google for "top 10 places to visit in…" lists or go on social media to get inspiration on where to go. GridTravel is built around user-generated routes — actual paths someone walked, that you can follow, save, download, and discover from other travelers. Users also have the ability to create private routes and collaborate with their friends.Tech stack: Mapbox (Nav SDK + maps), Supabase (auth, DB, storage), and Swift. Native iOS for now, Android coming soon.Our two real cost drivers are Mapbox Search (hit when users create routes) and Mapbox Navigation (hit when users use live navigation). Both have free tiers, then scale with MAU. We launched fully free to remove the barrier to entry. Revisiting pricing in Year 2 once nav costs start burning a hole in our pocket.Current state: we're in the UGC cold-start hole. The app's value scales with route density in a given city, but route density requires users, who require routes. Classic chicken and egg. Our current plan: 1. Manually seed 25–30 routes per city, starting with 5-10 priority cities where we have personal networks rather than spreading ourselves thin. 2. Short-form content as the primary social channel (TikTok, reels, shorts). Doing A/B testing: whether route walkthroughs convert better than informational/skit videos. 3. Partnering with micro-influencers in those cities (5k-50k following) for in-app routes plus cross-posts on their channelsCurious what HN thinks. Especially anyone who's shipped a UGC product. What worked for you on cold start? What do you wish you'd done dif
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I built µJS because I wanted AJAX navigation without the verbosity of HTMX or the overhead of Turbo.It intercepts links and form submissions, fetches pages via AJAX, and swaps fragments of the DOM. Single <script> tag, one call to `mu.init()`. No build step, no dependencies.Key features: patch mode (update multiple fragments in one request), SSE support, DOM morphing via idiomorph, View Transitions, prefetch on hover, polling, and full HTTP verb support on any element.At ~5KB gzipped, it's smaller than HTMX (16KB) and Turbo (25KB), and works with any backend: PHP, Python, Go, Ruby, whatever.Playground: https://mujs.org/playgroundComparison with HTMX and Turbo: https://mujs.org/comparisonAbout the project creation, why and when: https://mujs.org/aboutGitHub: https://github.com/Digicreon/muJSHappy to discuss the project.
Design & Creative
Built this solo. It watches SEC filings for executive and board changes, extracts the data, and shows it in real time. 2,100+ changes in the last 30 days. The comp data is interesting: average new CEO total comp is $8.4M across 284 appointments. The /explore page is fully open, no login needed.
Design & Creative
Design & Creative