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Powered by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow, Startup Monday is a weekly column highlighting Arlington-based startups, founders and local tech news. Monday Properties is proudly displaying 1515 Wilson Blvd in Rosslyn.
Anna Sullivan remembers marking her journey on a physical map using push pins.
It helped her visualize everywhere she’d been—but being a mapmaker, she couldn’t just pull it out when a friend who was planning a trip asked her where to visit or eat. Sometimes, her mind goes blank during these “on-the-fly” requests for advice.
“It’s hard to think back sometimes on a trip,” she tells RLNow. “I thought, ‘I wish I had this with you all the time.’
That’s how the former Ballston resident came up with the idea for PinPlanet, which she describes as a digital travel diary and travel planner. While she’s the creative force behind the app, Harut Boujakjian, who lives in Court, handles the technical and programming side of things with a third team member, Andrew Hornstra.
Sullivan and Boujakjian tried PinPlanet on recent trips to Ireland and Mexico. Now instead, instead of trying to remember which restaurants you ate at or what picnics you went on, you can capture the places and experiences you’ve had.
“It’s well-maintained,” he said. “It’s very easy to point people to it.”
Sullivan had been kicking around the idea since college, but it never went anywhere until she met Boujakjian in the summer of 2021. They started talking about developing the app and in May 2022 they launched a progressive web app.
“The friends and family that tried it wanted it to be a native mobile app,” he said. “So we took it upon ourselves to release the iOS app in November 2022. That was our hard work.”
Since then, Sullivan and Boujakjian have honed the app while traveling to New York, Philadelphia and Cincinnati, finding and fixing bugs or finding new features to add.
Next, he and Hornstra build an application for Android, which is not easy for such a small team, all of whom have day jobs.
Another functionality he plans to realize next year is something like an “explorer page,” which uses trips pinned by followers — perhaps combined with machine learning — to create a grid of recommended places for users to inspire future trips.
Taking a page from the book of social media and popular music platforms, Sullivan said she wanted to create a feature that would be reviewed throughout the year.
“Maybe we should dive deeper into travel statistics and find other ways to make it interactive and reflective — have an annual snapshot of your travel,” she said. In 2023, we’ll put together a video of the places you’ve been and make something you can share. People love that kind of thing.
Users like to download the app just to plug it in wherever they go, she says.
“Some include every detail about their trip because ‘I want to make sure I remember every detail,’” she says. “Others, they plug in wherever they were and have 90 pins. They want to see everything laid out.
To date, the app has nearly 400 users. The founders say it’s fun to see more people join, especially when someone finds the app and all their friends join — that’s how PiPlanet took on a group of users in Chechnya.
Although they developed the travel app during a time of global travel restrictions due to Covid, the duo realized they would love to use the app to inspire future travel.
“We knew at the time that not a lot of people were actively traveling, so we really focused on adding to wherever you were going,” Sullivan said. “It inspires a journey into the future and gets people excited about where they’re going next.”
Now, when you travel, you bring business cards with you for PinPlanet.
“It’s hard to get people to download an app even for a company they’ve heard of — let alone one they’ve never heard of. People have app fatigue,” Sullivan said. “It’s definitely a sweet thing to have people explore the idea first before downloading the app.”
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