My name is Shivam, and I am the founder of Map Your Voyage. I began my software engineering career in Singapore in 2016. After seven years in Singapore, my focus turned to full-time work on my India-based startup.
The idea came from a problem I faced myself—I had around 12,000 saved posts on Instagram, all sitting in the default "Saved" folder. When I wanted to visit a specific country, there was no easy way to figure out which posts were from that country.
Even if I managed to find them, I still had to rewatch all the reels and posts, jot down the locations manually, and figure out how to include them in my itinerary—a process that was incredibly time-consuming. That's what inspired me to create Map Your Voyage.
With Map Your Voyage, you can simply DM your favorite travel reels to our Instagram account while scrolling, and we’ll handle the heavy lifting — detecting locations from each reel and organizing them into country-specific bucket lists. When you’re ready to travel, you can turn these bucket lists into an itinerary in just a few minutes.
I’d love to get your feedback, suggestions, or general thoughts on this! Happy to answer any questions and connect with people across the community.
Thanks for sharing Map Your Voyage and welcome to the Travel Massive community.
The explainer video is very helpful and I encourage anyone else interested in your idea to watch the video.
Is there a simpler way to share the videos (e.g. share the reel URL to an external service or website) or is there a technical reason why you require people to DM to another account? This onboarding friction could slow down growing your platform.
Do you have any interesting insights so far about what kinds of journeys and bucketlists people are generating? e.g. top countries, places? And what tech did you build the platform in?
Thank you for the warm welcome and for taking the time to review Map Your Voyage—your feedback means a lot. We're grateful for your thoughtful questions, and I'll address them below.
On sharing reels more simply: You're spot on about onboarding friction, and we're actively exploring ways to minimize it. Currently, logged-in users can paste Instagram reel links directly into our search bar here: mapyourvoyage.com/app/build-itinerary-from-travel-content, which works seamlessly. We've prioritized DMs to our Instagram as the quickest option for users saving content on the fly—it's one less step while scrolling, and it helps us stand out as a unique solution. That said, we recognize it might not suit everyone, so a native app integration is on our roadmap if demand grows that will allow users to open Instagram links in our iOS OR android app to add locations to their bucket list.
On user insights for journeys and bucket lists: We have analytics in place to track this, but with our focus until recently on building core features, we don't yet have enough data for meaningful trends (e.g., top countries or spots). As we ramp up marketing, I'll circle back with some exciting early insights.
Tech stack: It's a lean, self-hosted setup: Next.js (frontend/backend), Postgres, Memcached, Redis, NATS for messaging, Bunny CDN, and Cloudflare. We host on Hetzner for its rock-solid reliability at a fraction of AWS/GCP costs—keeps us agile as an early-stage startup.
Thanks again for the kind words and encouragement, Ian.
Hi Shivan - you’re an absolute genius! I love this idea and I’m planning to try it later this week. If it works well for me, I’ll start recommending it right away ❤️
I also agree with Ian's comment, and it’s great that you’re offering another option. I’m not very technical, but one thought: I save reels into collections and organize them by country (e.g. Bulgaria, Italy, etc.). Each collection has its own URL, so if there were a way to share a full collection link rather than individual reels, that would be incredibly handy.
Love the concept - wishing you the best of luck with it!
Wow, thank you so much for the kind words—you just made my day! I'm thrilled you're excited to try Map Your Voyage and would consider recommending it. As a fellow travel enthusiast, that's exactly the kind of feedback that keeps us going.
Your collection idea is brilliant and spot on—I love how you're already organizing reels by country like that. It's a fantastic suggestion, and while we don't support full collection links yet, it's now top of our wishlist. In the meantime, pasting individual reel URLs or DMing them works great for building those itineraries. Can't wait to hear how it goes for you this week!
Wishing Kiss My Backpack all the success—let's stay connected and chat more about any feedbacks, suggestions or feature requests you might have.
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Comments
Hi Travel Massive community,
My name is Shivam, and I am the founder of Map Your Voyage. I began my software engineering career in Singapore in 2016. After seven years in Singapore, my focus turned to full-time work on my India-based startup.
The idea came from a problem I faced myself—I had around 12,000 saved posts on Instagram, all sitting in the default "Saved" folder. When I wanted to visit a specific country, there was no easy way to figure out which posts were from that country.
Even if I managed to find them, I still had to rewatch all the reels and posts, jot down the locations manually, and figure out how to include them in my itinerary—a process that was incredibly time-consuming. That's what inspired me to create Map Your Voyage.
With Map Your Voyage, you can simply DM your favorite travel reels to our Instagram account while scrolling, and we’ll handle the heavy lifting — detecting locations from each reel and organizing them into country-specific bucket lists. When you’re ready to travel, you can turn these bucket lists into an itinerary in just a few minutes.
I’d love to get your feedback, suggestions, or general thoughts on this! Happy to answer any questions and connect with people across the community.
Thanks,
Shivam
Hi Shivam,
Thanks for sharing Map Your Voyage and welcome to the Travel Massive community.
The explainer video is very helpful and I encourage anyone else interested in your idea to watch the video.
Is there a simpler way to share the videos (e.g. share the reel URL to an external service or website) or is there a technical reason why you require people to DM to another account? This onboarding friction could slow down growing your platform.
Do you have any interesting insights so far about what kinds of journeys and bucketlists people are generating? e.g. top countries, places? And what tech did you build the platform in?
Well done!
Hi Ian,
Thank you for the warm welcome and for taking the time to review Map Your Voyage—your feedback means a lot. We're grateful for your thoughtful questions, and I'll address them below.
On sharing reels more simply:
You're spot on about onboarding friction, and we're actively exploring ways to minimize it. Currently, logged-in users can paste Instagram reel links directly into our search bar here: mapyourvoyage.com/app/build-itinerary-from-travel-content, which works seamlessly. We've prioritized DMs to our Instagram as the quickest option for users saving content on the fly—it's one less step while scrolling, and it helps us stand out as a unique solution. That said, we recognize it might not suit everyone, so a native app integration is on our roadmap if demand grows that will allow users to open Instagram links in our iOS OR android app to add locations to their bucket list.
On user insights for journeys and bucket lists:
We have analytics in place to track this, but with our focus until recently on building core features, we don't yet have enough data for meaningful trends (e.g., top countries or spots). As we ramp up marketing, I'll circle back with some exciting early insights.
Tech stack:
It's a lean, self-hosted setup: Next.js (frontend/backend), Postgres, Memcached, Redis, NATS for messaging, Bunny CDN, and Cloudflare. We host on Hetzner for its rock-solid reliability at a fraction of AWS/GCP costs—keeps us agile as an early-stage startup.
Thanks again for the kind words and encouragement, Ian.
Best,
Shivam
Hi Shivan - you’re an absolute genius! I love this idea and I’m planning to try it later this week. If it works well for me, I’ll start recommending it right away ❤️
I also agree with Ian's comment, and it’s great that you’re offering another option. I’m not very technical, but one thought: I save reels into collections and organize them by country (e.g. Bulgaria, Italy, etc.). Each collection has its own URL, so if there were a way to share a full collection link rather than individual reels, that would be incredibly handy.
Love the concept - wishing you the best of luck with it!
Hi Stefani,
Wow, thank you so much for the kind words—you just made my day! I'm thrilled you're excited to try Map Your Voyage and would consider recommending it. As a fellow travel enthusiast, that's exactly the kind of feedback that keeps us going.
Your collection idea is brilliant and spot on—I love how you're already organizing reels by country like that. It's a fantastic suggestion, and while we don't support full collection links yet, it's now top of our wishlist. In the meantime, pasting individual reel URLs or DMing them works great for building those itineraries. Can't wait to hear how it goes for you this week!
Wishing Kiss My Backpack all the success—let's stay connected and chat more about any feedbacks, suggestions or feature requests you might have.