January 2025—Having released the Explore Cities! app recently, I keep coming back to a radically different approach.

What if I remove the map from my maps app?

Instead of seeing all places that you can explore in a city, what if the app only showed the ones nearby? Wouldn’t that make you actually go outside more?

And what if I focus the app entirely on history? After all, I’m someone who named his company after the Lindy Effect.

Imagine: “Collect all the historical photos of Amsterdam School buildings. The next one is 100m away.”

February 2025—So I started working on this, writing the app in SwiftUI which I don’t know, with the help of Cursor. I treat it as the AI’s project: it writes the code and also generates all content that’s shown in the app.

The first version has 3 components: a “radar” view of nearby places to explore, “quests” to check out specific neighbourhoods, and yes, again, a 3D map.

April 2025—The last weeks I focused on creating TikTok content to get people to pre-order the app. It’s been relatively successful!

I never liked marketing but this feels different. I’m building a pipeline for AI models to generate TikTok videos without my involvement. IMO the content is quite good even!

I’m currently working on increasing the conversion rate from TikTok, and preparing the app for launch.

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