As many of my friends know, my wife and I have been living and working remotely for over a year. Every month, we change it up and pick a new spot, packing up a couple suitcases and either throwing them into our SUV, or checking them for a flight.

As many of you also know, I'm always thinking up ideas for apps and products. Things that are pretty ridiculous and likely have no chance of holding my attention past 48 hours. They're fun to think about. I'll usually burn $14 on a domain name only to have my enthusiasm die faster than the next billing period.

I started to notice that the ideas that held my attention the longest were in the travel and hospitality space. Ideas for payments services, design tools, or for other marketplaces just never stuck, even though some of the ideas were legitimately good (or at least extremely polite people in my life would say they were).

So, with a compass roughly pointed at a space rather than an idea, I started to think of simple problems I encountered in my day-to-day travel life.

Enter recommendations

There are many companies that provide a way to discover great places around you. Yelp and Google Maps provide great direction from the public, with shareable lists offering some level of personal curation. Gowalla, Foursquare, and Step provide (or provided) a great way to see where your friends have been, while also supporting a number of features like check-ins, activity feeds, and so on. Last, curated sources like Monocle, Infatuation, and Eater employ great journalists with excellent taste, often providing another data point for me, the hungry travel planner.

But I just want solid recommendations from my friends. Open the app, see the recommendations, close the app.

With all of these current tools at my fingertips, I still struggle to find out what my friends would return to if they ever found themselves back in a given destination.

With Google Maps, I would often find out too late that someone had recommendations for me. Their individual list was tricky to add alongside other lists, and when I did get it all sorted, it became even harder to tell between "starred", "favorited", and "liked" really meant.

With apps that incentivized "checking-in" and gamification, it became difficult to determine if a friend would recommend a place, or if they are just trying to collect a badge.

So, I thought an easy way to enter the travel space would be to design a simple app of my own. One that is just designed to host your friends travel recommendations, and make it stupid easy to see what my friends – which, again, I have a lot in common with – want me to see.

Enter Roam Club

Roam Club is a recommendations app, designed with travel in mind. It's social, but I hope to keep it from becoming bloated with features many social networks tend to latch onto. I think of it as a utility, not a place to stay. Would you go back to this bar, restaurant, or attraction? Add it to Roam Club. The whole point of it is to reduce the time you spend on your phone and increase the time you spend engaged in a new place. On Roam Club, you can find your friends, and their recommendations are added to your map view alongside the rest of your friends. No more disparate Google Docs, no more confusing lists.

Is this an idea at the magnitude of self-driving cars? No – it's a simple little app that has brought me joy to design. I hope it brings you joy to use.

What's next

Really, not that much. I want to get this right. The first launch will be the basic functionality, and from there I want to hear about how I can make the app better. I have a couple ideas in mind, but please, help me validate them by providing feedback. And – as some of you can probably tell from the company name (Roam Global), I hope that Roam Club isn't the end of my investment in travel. There are so many parts of travel and hospitality that could be ready for significant change, past what an app can fix.

Keep exploring,

Braden 👨‍💻