I am going to build this app in public, which means writing down what I make, what breaks, and what I change my mind about while it is still fresh. This first post is the easy one to put off and the most important to write, so here it is: why I am building this at all.
The short version is that I built it for myself.
I am a solo founder in my late thirties, based in New York. I have worked in technology since college, and these days I do it as a consultant, which makes Meridian Dispatch a side project, built at night and on weekends around a day job. I am not quitting anything for it. I am building the app I personally wanted and could not find.
The reason I wanted it is that I travel a lot. I have been to more than forty-five countries, and the trips are the part of my life I care most about. Rafting and hiking in Patagonia. The Himalayas in northern India. Driving the Ring Road around Iceland. The Sahara, and the streets of Marrakesh. England, which counts twice for me because I spent part of my childhood there. I can tell you exactly how each of those felt. What I cannot always tell you is when they were, or in what order, or the name of the town where the best meal happened.
Because here is the embarrassing truth: I have all of these trips and almost nothing to show for them. I tried everything. Instagram was the obvious one, but Stories vanish, and even the posts are performances, made for other people rather than for me, so they never really represented the trip. I tried the apps that count your countries, and the idea was right but the experience was not. I tried a proper trip-logging app and it felt like homework, a spreadsheet I had to keep up to date, which is exactly the thing nobody wants to do on holiday. And the Photos app, where the trips actually live, just hands them back as an endless scroll with no shape. Forty-five countries, and not one tool that left me a memento worth keeping.
So I started building, and what I really wanted was one app that did all of it, instead of the handful of half-right ones I kept juggling.
I wanted to see where I have been: an honest map of every country, and the quiet pull to push the number higher. Forty-five is a start, and I want to find out how far I can take it.
I wanted to keep what each trip was. Not a feed, not a spreadsheet, not a folder of ten thousand photos, but a memento that hands a trip back to me with shape and meaning, private, made for me and not for an audience.
And I wanted to plan where I am going next. Right now my next trip lives as a pile of confirmation emails and a dozen open browser tabs, and I wanted that in the same place as everything else, not one more tool I would abandon by the second day.
One app for all of it: the trips I have taken, the memories they left me, and the ones I am still planning. Everything technical I am going to write about in the posts that follow, the globe, the photo detection, the AI, the trip films, the itineraries, exists to serve those three plain wants. I figured if I wanted it badly enough to build it on nights and weekends, other people who travel the way I do might want it too.
This is post one. I will work through how it actually got built, roughly in the order it happened, including the parts that took four tries and the features I was sure about and deleted anyway. If you want the honest version of building a polished app solo, around a full-time job, this is the place.