Routes was founded by Michael Gunnulfsen and Andreas Pedersen from FINN, after working with the project on FINN’s innovation day about a year ago. Since then the team has been part of Sandbox, FINN’s incubator for supporting intrapreneurships.This week they launched the service on iOS, Android and the website www.routes.guide.
“When deciding what to do when traveling, you are met with a lot of information and often promoted content. This makes it time-consuming and difficult to decide what to do when traveling to a destination where you’ve never been before. That’s why we started building Routes; to limit the decision-making process so that you can spend more time on exploring and enjoying the city you are in,” says Andreas Pedersen.
Routes aggregates relevant information from third-party services, which they combine with local knowledge from the users creating the routes. There are currently routes – or itineraries – available for more than 100 cities in different parts of the world, including New York, London, Barcelona and Paris. Each route has a map with transit directions and navigation, pictures, reviews and ratings from Yelp and Foursquare. The routes are also accessible in offline modus.
The Routes team: Michael Gunnulfsen: Developer, Truls Skeie: Developer, Andreas B. Pedersen: Product & Marketing, Bendik S. Hansen: Design
Attended accelerator program from Silicon Valley
Earlier this year Routes attended the 500 Startups accelerator program which helps early-stage startups with scaling, business law, product development, pitching and more.
“Attending the 500 Accelerator program was a great experience. We worked our socks off and learned a lot from great successful mentors from both Silicon Valley and Norway. It was also really valuable to connect with other entrepreneurs and build our network,” Andreas explains.
Europe’s biggest Hackathon – Front page of Product Hunt
Routes attended Europe’s biggest Hackathon in Helsinki competing with over 40 teams and won the main prize from the City of Helsinki. Routes also received the award for Outstanding User Experience Design by UX and design consultancy company Leadin.
“We are geeks so we love hackathons. We received good feedback on the idea and met many great mentors during the weekend. It was a great motivational boost for continue building the service.”
Routes also gained a lot of attention when hitting the front page of Product Hunt earlier this year, a service where users recommend new services daily.
Try Routes for your next vacation
With routes in over 100 cities, Routes can help you find itineraries from locals and travelers for your next stay.
“We would love everyone to try out Routes this summer, for finding local gems and making it more effortless to plan what to do on your vacation. If you do not find routes for your destination you can also request routes and we will contact locals that will create tailored routes for your stay.”
The road ahead
Looking ahead, the team plans to market the app this summer and work on getting more customer feedback.
“We are now starting to promote the product and looking for customer feedback to develop the product further. We are also working on building the community, finding influencers and relevant partners,” says Andreas