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Your time
It starts when you start. Stop for coffee for forty minutes and nothing is missed, because nothing left without you.
About
Tours on your time, your pace, your interests.
If these walls could talk, BeeMyGuide is there to share it. You pass the same corner every day, never realizing it has history. BeeMyGuide gives the walls, the city, the sidewalk, and the world around you a voice, keeping the history alive through the stories it narrates.
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Your pace
Linger at the one building you actually care about. Walk straight past the other nine. The guide keeps up either way.
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Your interests
Architecture, or crime, or food history, or all of it. Set what you want to hear about and the queue changes shape around you.
Skip the bus. Take the tour.
No set departure time, no group to keep up with, no route to follow.
How it works
Put the phone in your pocket and start walking. BeeMyGuide finds the places around you and tells you their stories: the history, the architecture, the thing that happened on that corner that only the locals know.
Tell it where you're going and it becomes a navigated tour, guiding you and telling you about the things you pass along the way. Have out-of-town guests and want to mix your own stories into the tour? Share the tour, or take it with your friends. Want to contribute to our library of tours? Contributors will get paid the way partners do; the terms are being worked out now.
Who's behind it
Right now, it's just me, Val, but my goal is to grow this and make BeeMyGuide a household name. I've spent the better part of the past fifteen years in Silicon Valley doing one thing well: bringing data together for customers. Collating and deduplicating it, the same problem this app addresses.
I have a passion for bringing data together and making it sensible, solving convoluted puzzles to build an elegant solution and deliver it to you. That is exactly what BeeMyGuide does: there are many sources behind it, and it brings them together and presents them as one story.
Where it is today
BeeMyGuide is open all over the world and speaks twelve languages. The denser the city, the more it has to tell you. San Francisco is where it has been tested hardest, but nothing stops you opening it anywhere else. If you're the first person ever to open it on a given corner, give it a few minutes to pollinate.
Tours are a different thing. They're built city by city, and so far they cover San Francisco, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Madrid, Barcelona, Málaga and Mar del Plata. After launch, a new city every week: four more in the first month.
| # | Month one, week by week |
|---|---|
| 1 | Paris |
| 2 | London |
| 3 | Tokyo |
| 4 | Washington, D.C. |
Help wanted
Doers, not analysts. Implementers, not theorists. Not looking for someone to manage the process, looking for someone to own it.
The plan is to stay lean. Craigslist changed the game by showing how a few dozen people can transform a market, and that's the direction I'm aiming for.
These are the roles that would accelerate BeeMyGuide right now.
- Marketing. The job right now is getting BeeMyGuide in front of the people who want it, at the moment they'd use it.
- Development. So many things to do: scaling and optimizing, reducing costs. Improving the UI, front end and back end. I'm happy doing this solo, but having another developer on this wouldn't hurt.
- QA. Test the app, recommend functionality and improvements.
- Sound. Add a dimension the stories don't have yet, and curate the audio of a tour: sound effects, spooky music.
The offer
Right now the offer is equity and co-founder credit, written down before you start, and your own part of the product to own. If that's a trade you'd take, tell me what you'd want to work on.
Questions, offers, complaints: val@beemyguide.travel.