NYC-based friends for close to a decade, Blair and Ellen are both fanatic travelers who turned their passion into a business. They’ve crisscrossed the globe solo, together, with family, and with friends, racking up trips to 66 countries and counting. Together, they came up with Etch: a social travel platform that makes meaningful travel easier to achieve. It’s a community of travelers and explorers, and a tool to help you best explore the world.
They came to us with a mobile app that was under production, halfway through what they wanted to achieve. They needed a team that could add the missing critical features to reach the MVP stage and publish it to the App Store. Taking over an existing product done by another team is always a challenge as you don’t know what you’ll encounter; you have to adapt to the existing architecture and understand the app’s logic.
We assembled the required team to work on both front-end and back-end tasks. We started reviewing what was done so far, to understand what was our starting point. With that in mind, we identified existing bugs that we had to tackle before moving forward. Afterward, we created a plan prioritizing the most needed features and additional ones that would be tackled after the primary ones were completed.
After 5 months of work, we published the app on the App Store, allowing every traveler to enjoy it. Among the key features offered by the app are: browsing destinations and activities, seeing where friends have traveled, collaborating and chatting with friends during your trip, building custom trip itineraries, collecting your favorite spots, and sharing full itineraries or specific destinations.