Step 1
Requirements & MVP Definition
Interplace - Turning Travel Experiences Into a Community Platform
Impact We Have Created Together
- 1000+ posts in first 3 months
- 500+ active users in month one
- Market-Ready in 4 months
- 35% reduced technical debt
When We Joined
We joined at the idea stage, shaping the product vision together with the founders and delivering the entire platform from scratch.
Who This Is For
Founders and startups aiming to build community-driven platforms with user-generated content, social interaction, and location-based discovery.
Duration:
12 months, Partnership ongoing
Type:
End-to-end MVP development for a startup, with full responsibility from product concept to implementation and initial operation.
Tech stack:
Product Design
iOS App
Node.js & PHP
MongoDB
Product Design
iOS App
Node.js & PHP
MongoDB
311
Views
Charlie Kinnett
Founder & CEO
- Idea
- Solution
- Key components
- Development Process
- Technology & Integration
- Main Features
- Main Challenge
- Advice We Give
- Most Special Step
Idea
According to studies, the average American doesn't even leave North America on their vacations. In fact, surveys show that about 64% of Americans have not taken a trip outside the U.S. in the last five years. The willingness or curiosity to travel to new locations around the world is very small compared to America's global contribution.
Our partner wanted to motivate Americans to travel more by developing a digital platform that is all about the travel experience.The platform should allow users to discover destinations through others’ journeys, plan trips together, and share structured travel stories in a dedicated community built by travelers for travelers.
Solution
We built an exclusive iOS MVP centered around an interactive 2D world map. Users can explore destinations, create structured travel albums, connect with other travelers, and visualize their personal travel progress. The system architecture was designed to support rapid iteration based on real user feedback.
Key components
Development Process
Step 2
Product & Design Concept
Step 3
Implementation
Step 4
Quality Assurance
Step 5
Deployment & Operation
We worked closely with the founders to understand motivation, define user flows, and prioritize an MVP focused on inspiration and sharing rather than feature volume.
A UI design system was created to define branding and interaction patterns. App and landing page designs were iterated multiple times to ensure clarity and usability.
The iOS app was built using MVVM and repository patterns. Core business logic was centralized in the backend to reduce frontend complexity and support future expansion.
Features were tested continuously, including media handling, offline behavior, and map interactions. A closed beta phase helped refine usability.
After launch, we remained responsible for stabilization, support, and further evolution of the platform.
Technology & Integration
Technology
Product Design
Figma for product redesign and design systems.
Mobile Apps
Flutter for iOS and Android using a single codebase.
Back-End
Custom back-end development for business logic and integrations.
Admin Panel
Custom admin panel for managing the entire platform.
Integrations
- Google Maps (2D map visualization)
- Google Places API (Route Calculation and GPS Accuracy)
- Social Logins (Google, Apple, Facebook)
- Socket-Based Real-Time Chat
- Firebase Cloud Messaging (Push Notifications)
- Custom Admin Panel
Main Features
User Authentication & Onboarding
Interplace offers secure and low-friction user authentication tailored to a consumer social platform. Users can register via Apple, Google, or Facebook social logins, or through an email and password flow secured by one-time password (OTP) verification. After registration, users are guided through a structured onboarding process that explains the core concepts of travel albums, map-based discovery, and community interaction. This onboarding ensures users understand from the first session that Interplace is focused entirely on travel experiences, not generic social content.
Explore Tours
Tours can be discovered through an interactive 2D map or structured list views. Users can search globally by region or city and quickly identify relevant tours based on location. Tours can be discovered through an interactive 2D map or structured list views. Users can search globally by region or city and quickly identify relevant tours based on location.
Album Post Management
Album posts are the core content format of Interplace. Instead of single images or short posts, users create structured travel albums that document entire journeys across multiple locations. During upload, images and videos are automatically enriched with location data, cities, and points of interest. Users can refine tags, add friends, associate events, and include short texts per location. This allows albums to represent real travel routes and experiences in a meaningful and reusable way.
Feed & Interactive 2D Map
Interplace provides two complementary ways to consume content. The classic feed presents travel albums in a structured list view, allowing users to quickly understand destinations, cities visited, and trip duration. The interactive 2D map view visualizes content geographically using clustered pins. Users can explore regions, zoom into destinations, and instantly view all media shared for a specific location, reinforcing the travel-first nature of the platform.
Explore & Community Discovery
The Explore feature enables users to discover destinations beyond their immediate network. Countries, cities, and places are explored through authentic user-generated content rather than curated marketing material. For each destination, users can see which travelers from their network have already visited and what experiences they shared. This supports both inspiration and practical trip planning, helping users discover new destinations through real people and real journeys.
Real-Time Chat & Notifications
Interplace includes a real-time chat system that allows travelers to communicate directly within the platform. Users can exchange travel tips, discuss destinations,or coordinate trips without relying on external messaging tools. Push notifications inform users about relevant interactions such as new comments, likes, or messages. Notifications are deliberately limited to meaningful travel-related events to avoid noise and maintain focused engagement.
Main Challenge
The biggest challenge was designing a global travel album creation process that feels intuitive while handling significant technical complexity in the background. Automatically assigning meaningful tags to images across different countries, languages, and points of interest required combining native iOS location frameworks with external APIs and custom logic. Location data was often incomplete or ambiguous, and the same place could appear under different names depending on region or language. We had to design logic that produced consistent, meaningful results without exposing this complexity to users, while keeping the system flexible enough to evolve as data quality and coverage improved.
What We Learned
We learned that location based automation only works reliably when paired with flexible data models and continuous refinement. Global products require early consideration of localization, naming consistency, and fallback strategies to handle imperfect data.
Why This Matters for Our Partners
These learnings enable us to build scalable content systems that manage complexity behind the scenes. Partners benefit from products that feel simple to use while remaining robust and adaptable across regions, languages, and long term growth scenarios.
Our Advice
If your product relies on user-generated content, invest early in creation workflows. The easier and more rewarding creation feels, the faster a community will grow.
Most Special Step
The album creation experience was the heart of Interplace and the most special part of the project. Combining high media volumes, many tag types, and real-time performance into a smooth and intuitive flow required close coordination between design and engineering. This feature defines the product’s identity and reflects our commitment to building platforms that feel purpose-built rather than generic.
Behance
Charlie Kinnett
Founder & CEO
5.0
Working with Vitec felt structured and reliable. They delivered on time, within budget, and stayed committed to the partnership.
Other References
Every successful project leaves behind measurable results and a clear path forward.
The references below show how we work, what we deliver, and the outcomes our partners achieve with us.
STRATEGY
UI/UX
SAAS
WEB DEVELOPMENT
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Karoly Aczel
Founder & CEO, Perpetuum Capital Ltd.
The founding team had years of hands-on ISO 27001 consulting experience and knew exactly what companies needed to get certified - but everything was delivered manually, one client at a time. The gap was clear: companies wanting ISO 27001 certification were either paying expensive consultants for work that could be structured into a guided tool, or they were lost in documentation without any support. The idea was to build two things that work together: a professional website that builds trust and sells digital products, and a SaaS application called Sentinel that guides organizations through ISO 27001 certification and ongoing ISMS management without needing a consultant in the room.
One-person consultancy → platform business
Use case
STRATEGY
UI/UX
MARKETPLACE
OfficeActor - End-to-End Influencer Booking Platform
Marlon B.
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0 manual booking steps
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