Hey Dev community 👋
We're Sam and Max, two mates from the UK who've been building a side project called TripMemo for the past year while grinding through 9-to-5s we're not exactly passionate about.
Wanted to share a bit about what we built and what we learned along the way.
The problem we were scratching
We both love travelling. But we kept having the same annoying realisation: we'd go on these amazing trips, take hundreds of photos, then nothing. The photos would sit in our camera rolls forever. We'd forget the name of that restaurant. The details would fade.
A year later someone would ask "how was Japan?" and we'd say "yeah it was great" with zero actual memories to share.
What we built
TripMemo turns trips into what we call TripBooks, basically digital travel journals with your photos, notes, and a map of everywhere you went.
The key features:
Real-time collaboration so couples and groups can add to the same TripBook simultaneously
Works fully offline, which is essential when you're travelling and have no signal
Polaroid-style layouts because we wanted it to feel like a physical scrapbook, not another social feed
Auto-organises by day so you can dump your photos in and it sorts them chronologically
Tech stack
For anyone curious:
React Native for the frontend, giving us iOS and Android from one codebase
Supabase for the backend
Supabase real-time collaboration features
MapLibre for maps (open source)
Cloud storage with offline-first architecture. The offline-first stuff was honestly the biggest technical challenge. Syncing data when users come back online, handling conflicts when two people edit the same trip... it's harder than it sounds.
Lessons from building while employed
Protect your energy
We only work on TripMemo when we actually want to. Forcing it after a draining work day just produces crap code and kills motivation.
Ship ugly, then iterate
Our first version looked awful. But it worked. Getting something real in our hands (and our friends' hands) taught us more than months of planning would have.
The boring stuff matters
We spent way too long on features and not enough on things like onboarding, App Store screenshots, and landing page copy. Nobody uses your cool features if they bounce in the first 30 seconds.
Side projects over side hustles
We didn't build this to get rich. We built it because we genuinely wanted it to exist. That mindset keeps you going when the motivation dips.
What's next
Still building. Still employed (for now). The dream is eventually doing this full-time, but we're not rushing it.
If you're curious: https://tripmemo.app/
Happy to answer any questions about the build, the tech choices, or the general experience of building something meaningful in your spare time.
Cheers,
Sam & Max
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