A walking-tour app where the story plays by itself when you reach the place it happened. I researched it in 2022, shelved it for lack of a developer, and built it alone in 2026 with AI-assisted code. It is live at girotours.co: 25 tours in 21 cities, from Palo Alto to Istanbul, in English and Spanish, with maps, offline mode and a travel journal.
The idea
In 2022, travelling with my wife, we kept running into the same wall. Guided tours ran on someone else's schedule, at someone else's pace, for a price that bought a lot of standing around. Audio guides were cheaper and duller. We wanted to wander at our own rhythm and still hear the story of the street we were standing in.
Giro is that: open it, pick a walk, put the phone in your pocket. When you get within thirty to fifty metres of a stop, the story starts on its own, with photos, links and sources for anyone who wants to go further.
Research first, then a long pause
Before drawing a single screen I ran more than 300 interviews with travellers, and talked with guides, artists and local experts in several countries. I mapped the competitors and where they fell short: clumsy apps, no tools for the people who know a city, nothing that scaled.
I designed the brand and the first prototypes and tested them. The concept landed. Then the project stopped: I couldn't write the code, and a solo founder in Kuala Lumpur couldn't raise the money to hire someone who could.
Building it alone
AI-assisted coding changed the maths. Between March and September 2026 I built Giro myself, end to end: product, design, front end, database, maps, audio, the content pipeline and the release. Next.js and React on Vercel, Supabase with PostGIS for the geography, MapLibre maps with walking routes, an offline mode that keeps audio, photos and map on the phone, and more than a thousand automated tests. Two security audits found 70 issues; all of them were closed before launch.
How it works, in four videos
Four short explainers, made from real screen recordings of the live app. They are the fastest way to see what Giro does.
How a tour gets made
Writing a good tour by hand takes weeks, which is why most cities have three. So I built a pipeline: AI researches historical and local sources, designs the route and its stops, writes the script with a voice of its own and narrates it with natural voices, and the tour is published with credited images, ready for offline. A person checks the facts and approves every route before it goes live, and every tour carries a visible "AI-assisted" label. Local creators can record their own.
Where it stands
Today there are 25 tours in 21 cities: Lisbon, Porto, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Dublin, Barcelona, Athens, Istanbul, Cannes, New York, Palo Alto, Coral Gables, Bogotá, Medellín, Rionegro and El Retiro. Fado in Lisbon, Kafka in Prague, punk to grime in London, techno in Berlin, graffiti in Medellín. All of them are free for now, in English and Spanish, with narration in more than twenty other languages on request.
It runs in any phone browser, iPhone included, from one link. The Android app is in closed testing on Google Play. Payments are wired and waiting. The next steps are paid tours, routes made to measure for operators and hotels, and partner shops along the way. See it at girotours.co.
What it taught me
Research earns its keep years later. The 300 interviews from 2022 decided the 2026 product: self-paced, offline, no account needed to browse, the story triggered by the place.
Timing matters as much as the idea. In 2022 I couldn't build this. In 2026 I could, alone, and to a standard I'd put in front of anyone.
Shipping beats planning. A live app with 25 real tours answers questions no pitch deck could.