Ptolemy: Project Management

Ptolemy was a two-person company: I took care of the technical side, and Simone Vaccari of content, destinations and marketing. We met while working at Outdooractive, a German digital mapping company, and decided to start working on a cultural heritage tour app.

We worked on it for three years, starting from zero. We met consistently throughout, and the work never stopped being hands-on. Neither of us had built a company before, so we learned a huge number of skills along the way. We talked to B2B partners, worked to understand how customers behave, analyzed the market, ironed out the business model and pitched to investors. All of that ran alongside the actual product: I kept developing the infrastructure, and we kept building the content for the app.

We took part in the EU-funded MediaFutures accelerator, which was a success and granted us 5,000 EUR. Our application laid out the product, the open data behind it, and a six-month plan for a first version with 30 tours, including tours about under-represented communities.

We also took Ptolemy to a big tourism conference in Milan, where we set up a kiosk right next to the biggest providers in the market. It put a two-person startup in front of travel professionals and partners, and gave us a direct look at how the established players pitch and sell.

Beyond building the product, I worked on:

• Grant applications, with MediaFutures the one that came through.
• An offer for hotels: a QR code sign for the reception and a code that unlocks the guide for their guests, sold as single-use codes or as a yearly subscription.
• Onboarding guides for partners and for the local experts who wrote tours, with content guidelines.
• Selling tours through marketplaces like GetYourGuide and TripAdvisor, next to our own checkout. We used Viator to coordinate these providers in one place.
• Marketing and branding: we designed the logo, leaflets and posters ourselves, so the brand looked the same on the website, in print and at events.

To run the business side, we used the tools a small product team needs. Google Analytics and Plausible showed how people used the site, Search Console showed how they found it, Stripe handled payments, and spreadsheets held the financial models and the business model work.

Keeping the tech simple mattered a lot for a team our size. Every part of the stack, from the map data to the audio tours, had to be something one developer could maintain.

The app was a big boost to our professional expertise and network and attracted significant attention from prospective business partners.