Pin My Map started with a question that should have been easy to answer. In 2024, our founder was getting ready for a trip to Singapore and Thailand with a friend. Before booking anything, she found herself asking: which of my friends have already been there?
Someone in her life had definitely been. Someone might even be living there. Someone else might be passing through at the same time. She just had no way of knowing which.
Three bad ways to answer a simple question
There were only ever three ways to work it out, and none of them were good.
- Scrolling her phone contacts. She had always saved friends with the city or country they lived in, so the list doubled as a rough map. It worked, in the way that reading a filing cabinet works.
- Digging back through social media. Somewhere in years of posts was the evidence. Finding it took so long that most of the time she simply did not bother.
- Memory. Trying to recall who had mentioned what, in which conversation, how long ago.
Meanwhile the internet was full of answers she did not want. Generic lists. Ranked reviews from strangers. The same handful of places, recommended to everybody. She trusted one friend who had actually been there more than any of it.
The best travel advice she had ever been given came from people she knew. It just was not written down anywhere.
The people you meet on the way
There was a second thing, too. Every trip leaves you with people who are not quite friends. Someone from the hostel. Someone you spent one very good evening with. Someone you would genuinely like to see again. There was never anywhere to put them.
Not a friend request. Not a group chat that dies in four days. Just somewhere you both find out when you are in the same place again. Their city, your city, or somewhere neither of you has been.
What Pin My Map is actually trying to fix
Pin My Map exists so that people swap what they already know, and so that knowing it brings them together instead of just informing them.
- Pin My Map cuts the research. Before a trip you can see who has been, who lives there, and who is going, without asking anyone.
- Pin My Map cuts the round of messages. No more sending the same "have you been to X?" to eleven people and piecing the replies together.
- Pin My Map cuts the worst moment of all. You get home, mention the trip to a friend, and find out they lived there for a year. They had a list. You never asked.
That last one is the whole thing, really. Pin My Map is a way to make sure it never happens again.
