Wanderlink

Strava for exploring a new city

I. Problem Definition

The Problem

Travelers in new cities often find themselves aimlessly wandering without direction or purpose, missing out on authentic experiences that match their interests.

While traditional travel apps provide static recommendations and reviews, they fail to create a dynamic exploration experience that adapts to the traveler's preferences and location in real-time.

Additionally, travelers frequently struggle with decision paralysis when faced with too many options in an unfamiliar environment, leading to suboptimal experiences or falling back on tourist traps rather than discovering authentic local spots.

Our Pivot Journey

Wanderlink began as a travel social media platform, where we believed travelers wanted a better place to share and organize their experiences. Our initial hypothesis was that existing platforms were either too broad (mainstream social media) or too commercial (travel review sites).

However, through extensive user research and early product testing, we discovered a fundamental insight: a social media platform wasn't actually solving travelers' core problems. What travelers truly needed wasn't another place to share photos, but rather a better "single-player mode" experience when exploring a new city.

This realization led to our pivot: transforming Wanderlink from a travel social network into "Strava for exploring a new city" — a tool that actively guides exploration rather than simply documenting it after the fact. We shifted our focus from social sharing to creating personalized exploration routes that help travelers discover a city based on their unique interests and preferences.

The pivot allowed us to address the real pain point: the uncertainty and inefficiency of exploring an unfamiliar environment. By providing curated routes and real-time guidance, Wanderlink now helps travelers make the most of their limited time in a new place.

The Team & Mentorship

Wanderlink was co-founded by Yuval Marom and Jeff Slobodkin, who combined their complementary skills to bring this vision to life. While I led the business development and product design aspects, Jeff provided crucial technical leadership and development expertise that enabled our rapid iteration and pivot.

Our journey was significantly shaped by the mentorship we received at the European Innovation Academy (EIA), one of the world's leading entrepreneurship programs. The EIA mentors provided invaluable guidance throughout our pivot process, challenging our assumptions and helping us refine our value proposition. Their expertise in user-centered design, business model validation, and product-market fit was instrumental in our ability to quickly identify the need to pivot and execute the transition effectively.

The structured mentorship framework at EIA encouraged us to validate our hypotheses through continuous customer discovery, teaching us to focus relentlessly on solving real user problems rather than building features based on assumptions. This mentorship was particularly crucial during our pivot, as it provided the external perspective and industry expertise needed to navigate such a significant directional change.

Customer Discovery & User Research

Our pivot was driven by in-depth user research that revealed critical insights about traveler behavior:

1. Exploration Challenges: In interviews with over 100 travelers, we discovered that 78% reported feeling uncertain about how to efficiently explore a new city, often resulting in wasted time and missed opportunities.

2. Social Sharing Fatigue: Contrary to our initial hypothesis, only 23% of travelers expressed strong interest in another platform for sharing travel content. Instead, 91% wanted better tools for the exploration process itself.

3. Experience Gap: We identified a critical gap between planning (which existing apps address) and documenting (which social media covers), with the actual exploration process being underserved by technology.

4. Validation of New Direction: When we tested our pivoted concept with potential users, we saw engagement increase by 340% compared to our original social media prototype, confirming we were on the right track.

These insights directly informed our product redesign, leading us to focus on features like interest-based route generation, real-time recommendations, and interactive exploration tools rather than social sharing functionality.

Product Overview

Wanderlink is now a personalized city exploration app that functions as "Strava for exploring a new city." We've created a platform that focuses on enhancing the real-time exploration experience by generating tailored routes based on user interests, time constraints, and location.

Our app combines intelligent mapping technology with local data to create dynamic exploration experiences, helping travelers discover hidden gems, optimize their routes, and make spontaneous yet informed decisions about where to go next.

Who are we building for?

II. Key Features

Core Platform Features

Wanderlink revolutionizes city exploration with three key features designed to enhance discovery:

III. Development Process

From Social Media to Exploration Platform

As Co-founder and head of Business Development & Product Design at Wanderlink, I led our team through a significant pivot that transformed our product vision and development approach:

Initial Concept & Pivot: We started building a travel social media platform, but after conducting over 100 user interviews, we identified a critical insight: travelers didn't need another place to share content, they needed better tools for the actual exploration process. This realization led to our pivot to become "Strava for exploring a new city."

Rapid Prototype Iteration: Working closely with my co-founder Jeff Slobodkin, we quickly redesigned our concept around guided exploration rather than social sharing. Jeff's technical expertise was instrumental in developing our location-based algorithms, while I focused on creating low-fidelity prototypes in Figma to test key features like interest filtering, route generation, and real-time recommendations.

Mentorship & Guidance: The European Innovation Academy mentors provided crucial direction during our pivot phase. Their expertise in lean startup methodology helped us structure our user testing process and interpret the results effectively. Weekly mentorship sessions with industry experts challenged our assumptions and pushed us to refine our value proposition with greater clarity and focus.

Technical Challenges: The pivot required significant changes to our technical approach. We shifted from a content-focused architecture to a location-based system that could provide real-time guidance. This involved integrating mapping technologies, developing recommendation algorithms, and building a more robust location services infrastructure.

User-Centered Redesign: I personally led the UX/UI redesign process, creating wireframes and prototypes that prioritized exploration features. We conducted extensive user testing to ensure our new interface effectively supported discovery rather than content creation.

Validation & Launch: Before fully committing to the pivot, we tested our new concept with a small group of early users. The engagement metrics were impressive—users spent 3x longer in our exploration app compared to our social media prototype, confirming our new direction was correct. We launched our pivoted MVP within just 3 months of the decision to change course.

The pivot process demonstrated our team's agility and commitment to building a product that truly solved user problems, even when it meant significantly changing our initial vision.

IV. Conclusion & Learnings

What I Learned

Pivoting Wanderlink from a travel social network to an exploration platform provided powerful insights about product development and startup execution:

Challenge Your Initial Hypothesis - Our pivot taught me the importance of rigorous hypothesis testing. While we initially believed travelers wanted better tools for sharing experiences, our research revealed they actually needed better tools for having those experiences in the first place. Being willing to challenge our initial assumptions was crucial to finding product-market fit.

Focus on Core User Problems - The social media landscape is crowded because sharing is a secondary need, not a primary one. By refocusing on the core problem of exploration, we found a much clearer path to adding unique value. This reinforced the importance of solving fundamental user problems rather than incremental improvements to existing solutions.

Value of Complementary Co-Founders - Working with Jeff Slobodkin highlighted the importance of having co-founders with complementary skills. While I focused on business development and design, Jeff's technical expertise allowed us to rapidly prototype and validate our ideas. This balance of skills was essential to our ability to pivot quickly and effectively.

Importance of Mentorship - The guidance we received from mentors at the European Innovation Academy provided crucial external perspective during our pivot. Their experience helped us avoid common pitfalls and accelerated our learning process, demonstrating the invaluable role that quality mentorship plays in startup development.

Balance Vision with Flexibility - While our ultimate vision of enhancing travel experiences remained consistent, we needed flexibility in how we achieved that goal. Learning to distinguish between the unchanging "why" of our product and the adaptable "how" was essential to navigating our pivot successfully.

Design for the Actual Context of Use - Creating an exploration tool required deep consideration of the real-world context in which it would be used: on-the-go, potentially with limited connectivity, and often in unfamiliar surroundings. This context-aware design approach significantly improved our user experience compared to our initial social media concept.

The Wanderlink journey reinforced that successful products aren't simply good ideas executed well—they're solutions that evolve based on continuous learning and a relentless focus on solving real user problems.