Group Tripper
The shared itinerary for every group trip that actually happens.
THE STORY
Every group trip I've been part of has the same arc. Someone creates a Google Doc, three people use it, the rest just text the group chat, and by the time you're actually booking flights you've lost track of who wanted what. I wanted one link that everyone could click and immediately see the plan — no signup, no friction, just the itinerary. The whole product is designed around a single uncomfortable truth: the people who matter most to your trip are never the ones who signed up for the app.
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.
You only pay if the trip was worth it. That alignment felt right — and avoids the awkwardness of charging a subscription for something people use a few times a year.
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