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truvvl — TikTok for blogs, discover and create travel stories
Blogging that doesn't suck on mobile
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For 91 Days
Created by travelers for travelers - a fair social media platform with a strong community!
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👋 Hi everyone! I made this new app called truvvl.
🤔 Problem
I love traveling. My best source for finding cool places are travel blogs. A lot of the top results on Google are crap, finding the good ones is as difficult as finding truffles (a rare mushroom) - you need a truffle pig.
I started by making a list of travel bloggers that I like. Since there was no way to search them all at once (I was googling “site:thatcoolblog.com chiang mai” twenty times for different blogs), I created my first startup, TravelFeed, and asked travel bloggers to share their posts there.
Many did and I now regularly use TravelFeed to research my destinations. When I recently went on a trip without my laptop I realized how much scrolling through an endless blog post on mobile sucks - and don’t even talk about keying in a 2,000-word blog post on your smartphone.
I asked other travelers where they share their travel stories and they use Instagram and TikTok because these apps provide a great mobile experience. There is some great travel content there, but a 15 second clip is just way too short to share detailed information.
🎉 Solution
I made an app that combines the amazing mobile experience of stories with the informativity of travel blogs.
👉 Features
✅ 25,000 blog posts from TravelFeed have been converted to stories. Stories are swipeable, have big font on colorful backgrounds and photos that fill the whole screen.
✅ You can discover new stories (randomly, nearby or by followed accounts) by swiping up, and if you are interested to read more, keep swiping left until you are bored. Then swipe up again.
✅ Creating stories is easy and works much more like Instagram’s story creation tool than a traditional blog editor.
✅ With truvvl, you own your stories! Not only can they be permanently stored on the Hive blockchain, you can also host them on your own domain. On the web, stories are viewable as AMP web stories. And Google loves them! In fact, web stories appear in the Google search and can give your blog a nice SEO boost.
✅ To make things more fun, there are random drops of truvvl coins. The more you use the app, the less likely is your chance of a drop, but the odds reset each day. Right now, truvvl coins are just for showing off on the leaderboard, but I’m thinking of letting users redeem coins to include external links in their stories or to buy special stickers or filters.
💳 Monetization
I might offer in-app-purchases of truvvl coins in the future, but mostly, truvvl is a funnel to TravelFeed. TravelFeed lets you start a free community blog. You can then upgrade to launch your blog on your own domain. It just takes two minutes to set up and if you want to customize your site, there’s a convenient site builder. TravelFeed also offers cross-posting to the Hive social blockchain that rewards users in cryptocurrency and takes a small, optional fee for that. Both services are also integrated in truvvl.
Let me know what you think!
Julian
👉 Features
✅ 25,000 blog posts from TravelFeed have been converted to stories. Stories are swipeable, have big font on colorful backgrounds and photos that fill the whole screen.
✅ You can discover new stories (randomly, nearby or by followed accounts) by swiping up, and if you are interested to read more, keep swiping left until you are bored. Then swipe up again.
✅ Creating stories is easy and works much more like Instagram’s story creation tool than a traditional blog editor.
✅ With truvvl, you own your stories! Not only can they be permanently stored on the Hive blockchain, you can also host them on your own domain. On the web, stories are viewable as AMP web stories. And Google loves them! In fact, web stories appear in the Google search and can give your blog a nice SEO boost.
✅ To make things more fun, there are random drops of truvvl coins. The more you use the app, the less likely is your chance of a drop, but the odds reset each day. Right now, truvvl coins are just for showing off on the leaderboard, but I’m thinking of letting users redeem coins to include external links in their stories or to buy special stickers or filters.
💳 Monetization
I might offer in-app-purchases of truvvl coins in the future, but mostly, truvvl is a funnel to TravelFeed. TravelFeed lets you start a free community blog. You can then upgrade to launch your blog on your own domain. It just takes two minutes to set up and if you want to customize your site, there’s a convenient site builder. TravelFeed also offers cross-posting to the Hive social blockchain that rewards users in cryptocurrency and takes a small, optional fee for that. Both services are also integrated in truvvl.
Let me know what you think!
Julian
Downloaded the app now and liked the design and concept...is there any way to find specific people I like and follow them? Will the Home Screen feed then be changed to people I follow? As of now I see random cities and places
And I like the UX idea of vertical scroll for a new city and swipe left to see details of that city / country.
Lastly do you also allow videos?
Thanks for trying out the app!
- You can search for specific places, tags and people in the "Discover" tab.
- If you like a story, you can also click on the avatar to get to the user's profile where you can follow them.
- There is a shuffle symbol on the top right of the Home screen where you can switch the feed between "recommended", "nearby" and "following".
- The recommended feed is mostly random right now, I plan to personalize it more based on your follows & interests. Do you think it would be a good idea to add an initial prompt to choose from a list of recommended destinations and users to follow?
- Video support is planned, but more difficult to implement and more expensive to maintain than photos, so it didn't make it into the MVP.
I'm a nomadic travel blogger so this is useful for me. I can search travel events nearby. I can also embed web stories which may boost my site's SEO because Google apparently likes web stories SEO-wise. Also easy to use and in the travel niche which will only show me relevant stories and micro blogs.
I think this project is the Best project because it is a very outstanding project very good so far.
@alexander_alexander2 Thanks for your nice comment, enjoy sharing your travel stories!
The app that really changed my life is truvvl travel app, except that it’s not really an app at all. It’s the beginning of a new lifestyle.
