Group Tripper
A frictionless way to share itineraries and important links with everyone on the trip — no accounts, no app downloads.
THE STORY
Group trips have a coordination problem. Everyone's in a different group chat, links get buried, and the person who made the Google Doc is the only one who can find it. I wanted to build something dead simple — a single link you send to the group that has everything in one place. No one needs to create an account or download anything. The whole product is designed around that constraint: if there's any friction, people won't use it.
KEY DECISIONS
Session tokens stored in localStorage give persistent identity without registration. Removing signup eliminated the most common drop-off point. The trade-off is a robust email recovery path for users who switch devices — which became its own feature.
One URL puts the whole group into the same itinerary instantly. No one needs an account to contribute. This decision shaped everything — routing, auth model, member roles, and the marketing site copy.
A curated city itinerary library (starting with Chicago neighborhoods) gives the app discoverable SEO content that converts into real trips. Each published itinerary is a template anyone can clone.
Built the entire product without writing code directly. Claude handles strategy, mocking, prompt writing, and SQL. Cursor executes Claude-written prompts as code changes. Every feature starts as a Notion ticket and ends as a PostHog event.
RESULT
Shipped a publicly accessible app at grouptripper.co with real users. Built and iterated an editorial content layer with 8+ published Chicago itineraries. Running at minimal cost on Vercel + Supabase + Cloudflare. Zero direct code authoring — entire codebase produced through Claude prompts executed in Cursor.
STACK