English
My name is Adrijana, I'm 29, and I work remotely in influencer marketing management. My partner Kristjan is a software engineer. We've been traveling together since the very start of our relationship, and by now, we've visited over 45 countries together.
In March 2021, we both went fully remote and decided to stop just taking trips and start actually living on the road. We packed two backpacks (no suitcases, ever) and haven't really stopped since.
The Airport Bus Moment
Here's the thing about arriving in a new city: you're tired, you're on a bus or in a taxi from the airport, and you have maybe 30 minutes before you reach the hotel. That's when you want to quickly check: what's actually worth seeing here? What are the top spots? Any interesting facts I should know?
And every single time, the same frustrating process. Open Google Maps. Search "things to do." Click on a pin. Read reviews. Click another pin. Open a browser tab. Find a blog post. Scroll past 800 words of someone's life story to get to one useful paragraph. Open another blog post. Different format, different recommendations, no way to compare.
By the time we'd get to the hotel, we'd barely have a plan. And we'd have wasted the entire ride scrolling instead of looking out the window.
"I'll Just Build It"
One evening, I think we were in Tbilisi, I was doing the usual routine on my phone, and Kristjan just said: "Why don't I build something for this?" He's a developer, so his solution to every frustration is to write code. But this time, he was right.
What we actually needed was dead simple:
1. Type the city name, that's it
2. See a clean list of the best attractions with real Google ratings
3. Two sentences of facts per place, not an essay, just enough to know what you're looking at
4. One interesting detail, something you'd actually tell a friend about later
No account. No booking upsells. No "sign up for our newsletter" popup. Just the information.
We Use It Every Single Time
Kristjan built the first version in a few weeks, and we started using it immediately. Now it's our routine: we land somewhere new, get on the bus, pull up City Buddy, and within two minutes we know what's worth seeing.
It sounds so simple, but that's the whole point. We don't want a travel planner. We don't want a 47-tab research session. We want to arrive, glance at the top spots and a few interesting facts, and then go explore.
Over time, we kept adding things we wished we had:
"Is the tap water safe here?" So we added it.
"What does a beer cost?" Added it.
"How walkable is this city?" Added it.
"What's the local dish we should try?" Added it.
Every feature exists because we actually wanted it while standing somewhere with our phones out.
Two Backpacks and a Routine
We travel light, always backpacks, never suitcases. We love walking tours, random hikes, and finding a cafe with a good view to work from. We're not luxury travelers and we're not roughing it either. We just like showing up in a new place and figuring it out.
City Buddy fits exactly into that. It's not trying to plan your entire trip. It's for that specific moment when you arrive somewhere and think "okay, what's here?", and you want an answer in two minutes, not two hours.
Why I'm Writing This
City Buddy started as a personal tool. Kristjan built it because we needed it, and we kept using it because it was genuinely useful. At some point we realized that if it's this helpful for us, other people probably have the same frustration.
So here it is. No venture capital, no marketing team, no growth hacks. Just a tool built by two people who travel a lot and got tired of the alternatives.
If you've ever been on that bus from the airport, scrolling through Google Maps trying to figure out what to do, this is for you.