I kept DMing myself Instagram reels I never visited, so I built an app that turns them into a map
For years I had a dumb habit: I'd see a reel of a great cafe or restaurant, DM it to myself "to visit later", and it would vanish into my DM graveyard. Saving one properly meant leaving Instagram, figuring out the name, searching Maps, saving - too much friction, so I never did it. My DMs were a graveyard of places I was never going to see.
So I built Go There. You forward the DM (or a TikTok / YouTube / Google Maps link) and the actual place ends up pinned on your own map: it reads the content, figures out which place is meant, verifies it against Google Places so hallucinated venues never reach your map, and saves it. Seven channels, zero friction. As far as I know it's the only app that saves straight from an Instagram DM.
It's live on iOS + Android in 6 languages: https://burayagidelim.com/en
Stack for the curious: React Native + Expo, FastAPI + Temporal agent pipeline on the backend, Gemini for extraction, Supabase. The single best engineering decision was a deterministic verification layer after the LLM - the model only proposes, the ground-truth API decides.
Where we are: growing fully organically (zero paid marketing), users saving places across multiple countries, and the Instagram-DM save is the moment people consistently describe as "magic" - so we just rebuilt the whole onboarding around getting every new user to that moment in their first minute, and shipped an e2e test suite to make sure it never regresses. Next milestone: launching on Product Hunt on August 12.
Two things I'd genuinely love takes on from people who've been here:
- For a consumer app, what's the most repeatable acquisition channel you've found beyond app store search?
- If you've done a PH launch - what's the one thing you wish you'd done in the final week before it?
Happy to answer anything about the build, the agent pipeline, or the go-to-market.
Update: we're live on Product Hunt today 🚀 https://www.producthunt.com/products/go-there — launched this morning, maker comment is up, and per the advice in this thread we're treating it as an asset-builder, not the growth plan: the repeatable effort goes into the per-channel deep links + first-save tracking we discussed here. If you have 2 minutes today, honest feedback in the PH comments (what would make it daily-use for you?) is worth more to us than any upvote. I'll post the spike-vs-loop numbers here in a few weeks as promised.
The strongest part here is rebuilding onboarding around the Instagram-DM save instead of explaining the whole product. For repeatable acquisition, I'd turn that exact action into a 10-second before-and-after reel and post it on Instagram and TikTok, where the pain already happens. Give each channel its own deep link or invite code, then measure the first successful save, not installs. Product Hunt may create a spike, but those native demos have a better shot at turning into a loop.
This is exactly the kind of take I posted for - thank you. We do publish how-it-works reels, but you've put your finger on the two pieces we haven't done: per-channel deep links / invite codes, and measuring FIRST SUCCESSFUL SAVE per channel instead of installs. Installs were quietly lying to us about which channel works, for exactly the reason you'd guess - some sources install and never activate.
Also taking the framing that PH is a spike while the native demo is a potential loop. We'll treat Tuesday's launch as an asset-builder and put the repeatable effort into the reel + tracked-link combo. Will report back on the numbers once we have a few weeks of per-channel first-save data.
You’ve already seen users consistently react to the Instagram DM save as the “magic moment.”
What have you learned from those users that changed how you think about who Go There is really for?
Great question. The biggest shift: we thought we were building for "travelers", but the people who hit the magic moment hardest are the group's planner - the friend who organizes everyone else's weekend. They don't save places before a trip; they save continuously, all year, and decide later. That reframed the product from a travel tool you open twice a year into a memory layer you feed weekly.
It changed three concrete things: targeting moved from a demographic ("likes travel") to a behavior ("already DMs themselves reels") - the habit exists, we just close the loop. Copy stopped selling trip planning first and now leads with the save. And onboarding's only job became getting the first save to happen in the first minute; everything else (AI trips, lists, sharing) reveals itself after that hook is set.
The other surprise was how geography-agnostic it is. The same behavior shows up in every market we localized for - the planner friend is apparently universal.
That’s a pretty meaningful shift — from “travelers” to a specific behavior and role within the group.
I’d like to continue the conversation outside the thread and hear more about what you’re seeing. What’s the best email to reach you on?
Happy to - you can reach me at receptopalak@gmail.com. Looking forward to it.
Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.