Learn How to Put Your Map into an App

Pietro Ferraris, CEO of map2app and part of the Travel Massive Milan chapter is here to show you how you can put your map directly into an app.

map2app is a B2B web platform that allows you to create mobile travel guides in a more convenient way. They work with OTAs, tourism boards, event organisers, travel portals, and anyone who owns local content and has a desire to turn that into a travel app.

What inspired you to create this startup?

My cofounders and I are travellers and few years ago we realised that there is a lot of destination specific content on the web, but for most companies it is still very expensive to turn that content into an app. Unfortunately, travellers very often don’t have access to data connection while travelling and can often rely on offline apps. We allow businesses to turn their content into offline travel guides thus allowing them to be in the pocket of their customers while travelling.

How did you build your startup?

We started our company having business development in San Francisco (SF) and development in Italy. Being in SF was important in order to raise funds and challenge our ideas. Development in Italy was much cheaper but still the quality was very good.

How is your startup disrupting the travel scene today? 

Today there are lots of platforms and frameworks for creating mobile apps, but we were one of the first to introduce a tool for creating apps focused on travel. Among the travel-specific features we offer, we introduced itineraries management, audioguide, multi language support, geo-located push notifications and so on.

How did you get your startup off the ground and gaining traction?

We started by collaborating with lots of travel bloggers who created the first apps, helped us to spread our brand and gave us precious feedback about both the app creation platform and the apps. This allowed us to publish the first 100 apps or so in very few months thus giving the map2app brand credibility and many case studies to present to the first b2b customers.

Travel Massive is about empowering change in travel. How is your startup changing the future of the industry or helping to make travel better?

Travel guides are of great help during a trip and you can find hundreds of travel guides about the “big” destinations. However, there are not many apps for smaller destinations; this happens because creating an app can be very expensive, complex and time consuming and sometimes it is just not worth creating. We remove all of these barriers and allow anyone who owns contents to turn them into an app. Thanks to our platform some of our customers were able to publish niche (but super cool) products such as a guide to street food in Thailand, a guide to horse riding through places in Italy, a guide to Woody Allen’s favorite places in New York, and the list goes on and on. We published more than 700 travel guides to date …and counting!

Do you have any tips for new entrepreneurs who want to create a successful startup?

Build a great team, think of scalability from day one, don’t fall in love with your product and be ready to turn it upside down, fail fast, fail cheap and then keep trying 😉

Travel Start-Up is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. Connect with Pietro Ferraris and map2app on Travel Massive, Facebook and Twitter.