Taking a tour can do wonders for helping you to learn about a city—but some people just don’t like trekking around with a group. These independent travelers would rather explore on their own, with a partner or a couple close friends. But there’s a downside to this approach: without a professional guide, they don’t have access to the kind of rich information that gives context to what they’re seeing. That’s why Boston University alum Frank Pobutkiewicz decided to build FollowAlong—a mobile touring platform and library for interactive walking tours. The app will allow users to search a library of curated Boston tours and adventures and instantly gives them access to the same great content.
The idea came about after Pobutkiewicz brought a team of 24 U.S. high school students to China. While on the trip, he noticed it was difficult for their tour guide to hold the attention of a larger group, despite the fact that they were providing interesting information. The following year, Pobutkiewicz designed a series of printed note cards with trivia questions, riddles, and photo challenges to gamify the experience--and it was highly effective in getting the students engaged, because everyone had to pay attention to what the tour guide was saying in order to correctly answer the questions.
“They all loved that the tour became immersive,” he told BostInno in an email interview.
Soon after, Pobutkiewicz met Douglas Soons, a fellow travel enthusiast who currently runs financial advising firm Revolution Capital, at the Cambridge Innovation Center's Venture Cafe. In speaking with tour operators, the duo learned that they lose up to 30 percent of potential customers for one of several reasons: they showed up late to a scheduled tour, someone in their group was disabled, someone in the group didn’t speak English, or they simply didn’t want to go on a group tour.
“We designed FollowAlong not to replace tour guides, but to increase their business by capturing additional travelers on a new platform,” Pobutkiewicz said.
The model
Rather than creating content themselves, the startup—which is based at the CIC—is partnering with local influencers, tour operators, and organizations to digitize their existing content. The categories for the digitized tours range from history, science and innovation, and shopping, to food and drink, sports, and university. Once a user purchases a FollowAlong, (a digitized tour), it’s theirs forever to use as many times as they’d like. Features include a geotagged map, instructions from stop to stop, trivia, and interesting facts about each stop. FollowAlongs will cost between $5 and $25, with some free offerings.
FollowAlong is planning to launch a public beta test over the July 4th weekend, lasting through mid-September. Once the founders can analyze how users are interacting with the app, they’re planning to add more features, such as question and answer boards for each tour, user discovery on the map so that travelers can find others to connect with, and gamified elements to rewards users who complete multiple tours and answer trivia correctly.
“With the number of travelers that visit Boston each summer—estimated to be over 10 million, we’re home to a great test market,” added Pobutkiewicz.
Right now, the startup is running a referral campaign on its website that will give users free access to every tour in the library for a year if five of their friends sign up. Following the test this summer, they will be devising plans for native FollowAlong iOS and Android apps. The team will also open up the backend of its system so that anyone can write, publish, and sell their own FollowAlongs in the startup’s library. After Boston, Pobutkiewicz says their initial target expansion cities include Washington DC, New Orleans, Seattle, and Austin. But he noted that they’ve already been getting request from potential partners in London and New York.
“Within the next two years, we want to be very aggressive in opening new cities—but only once we feel we have a fully developed library of incredible content,” he added.
Image of Fanueil Hall/Boston skyline via Shutterstock. App screenshot via FollowAlong.
