Product Designer and Engineer → Head of Design → CEO
2011 – 2017
Stay.com was a travel service for city travel, focusing on high-quality local spots, rather than famous landmarks and global chains. By teaming up with local chefs, baristas, bartenders and artists, Stay.com was able to build the best city travel content on the market, which we delivered through high-quality products on all platforms.
This was my first substantial project, and it wasn't until afterward that I fully appreciated the outsized results delivered by such a small team. The product was featured in Forbes, New York Times and TIME, as well as in technology press such as TechCrunch.
High-quality content from local experts
Collaborating with local insiders, Stay.com featured curated quality venues – places you would not easily find on your own. More than 2,500 local baristas, bartenders, chefs, DJs and other experts revealed their city's best gems.
To manage this vast content operation, we built Backstage – a custom CMS designed specifically for destination content. The system supported a multi-step workflow where local expert recommendations were refined by professional writers and reviewed by our editorial team, ensuring consistent quality across all 30,000 venues.
The result was the most highly refined destination content on the market. All venues followed the same uniform format and tone of voice, making it easy for travelers to find places to visit. The content was also neatly tagged and categorized, which made it easy for developers and designers to build great products.
This approach emerged from our early insight in 2011, when we saw that crowd-sourced travel content was headed in the wrong direction. Top travel sites were surfacing marketing-savvy tourist spots, rather than genuinely interesting places. We believed that local experts were the solution – there is no better authority on a city's restaurant scene than an experienced chef living and working in the city.
Stay.com allowed travelers to download the entire city for offline use. This was not limited to the map – the offline bundle included all the curated city guides, with images, editorial descriptions, and contact details.
We offered the most sophisticated offline support in the travel space for several years. Changes made to a collaborative city guide while offline, would seamlessly be synced with other travelers when you go back online, including conflict resolution.
In 2015, this was a big deal, due to wildly high data costs abroad, and fewer public WiFi networks than what we have today.
Brand identity
The logotype and app icon was designed by Lars Arve Bratteberg / Minus Minus. From his work I designed a concise 15-page identity manual, covering logo use, typography and colors, as well as photography, language and key visual elements from the UI.
The Stay.com product experience was routinely tested, both pre-release and in production, in-house and remote, with real users and with people unfamiliar with the service.
Combining quantitative research with analysing usage metrics, we worked deliberately towards strengthening our five core conversion points: app installs, city downloads, guide creation, invites to collaborate, and day 7 retention. Usability testing, UI behavior tracking, and rapid prototyping were key components in this work.
The activation and retention numbers we achieved in this product, I have not seen since.
Technology
I worked closely with the CTO and the developers to design and maintain the platform and architecture. As the project evolved, we made a number of deep changes to the core structure of the app, while serving a growing number of customers.
I had the pleasure of working with this highly skilled and dedicated team.
Wei Zhuo, Leah Plotz, Ariana Hendrix, Andrew Gubanov, Lars Bæk, Gurudutt Verma, Claudia Menger, Alex Makarov, and myself. Joachim Paasche was not there for the photo.
Credits
Stay.com was founded by entrepreneur Joachim Paasche, PhD, after a previous successful exit in the travel space. I am hugely grateful to Joachim for the opportunity he offered me with Stay.com. I am also grateful for the guidance provided by Gunnar and Simona at Braganza.
Unfold played an important role in defining the foundation for Stay.com, in particular Eric, Marita, and Egil. They also made sure Stay.com received an award for Design Excellence by the Norwegian Design Council.
Forbes, New York Times, and TIME
We received attention from some of the world's largest publishers, including Forbes, New York Times, and TIME, as well as technology press like TechCrunch and The Next Web.
Closed down in 2017
By late 2016, Stay.com had reached one million app installs and 500,000 signed-up travelers.
Half of the travelers had created personal city guides, with friends or by themselves. Half of them had offlined a city. When traveling, people would use the app an average of 11 times daily. Our most enthusiastic travelers had visited 30 cities with the help of Stay.com and used the app more than 3,000 times.
A lack of business opportunities forced Stay.com to close its doors early 2017. The entire team were offered positions at the world's largest travel companies.
The Stay.com domain, and our portfolio of ~25 other top level domains, were later sold.
