I travel a fair amount for client work. A week in Berlin, two weeks in Lisbon, the occasional sprint in a city I’ve never been to. Over time I’ve gotten weirdly specific about the tools that handle the non-work side of being somewhere new: where to eat, how to get around, which neighbourhoods are worth the limited evening hours I actually have.
Most of what I’ve tried is either bloated (TripAdvisor, I’m looking at you) or too generic to be useful. A while back I found something that changed how I approach a new city.
Mapita
Full disclosure: I’m building this one. Mapita is a side project I’ve been developing, and I think it’s worth writing about because it’s the kind of tool I actually wanted to exist.
It’s a platform built around premium city guides and curated maps. Not a review aggregator, not a check-in app. Just good, opinionated maps made by people who have spent real time in these places.
The pitch is simple: instead of reading 400 reviews to find the three places worth visiting, you get a curated map organised by theme or neighbourhood. Clear, visual, no sponsored clutter. I pulled it up before a trip to Porto last year and had a better first evening there than I’ve had in cities I’ve visited a dozen times.
The best recommendation is a confident one from someone with taste.
What I keep coming back to is what Mapita has chosen not to build. No social layer, no gamification, no streak tracking. The product just helps you navigate a city well and gets out of the way. That’s rarer than it should be.
How it fits into my routine
Before I land somewhere new, I open mapita.io and find guides for where I’m staying or what I’m after: coffee shops with wifi, somewhere good for a client dinner, a walk for Sunday morning. The map view means I can see immediately what’s nearby without juggling three tabs.
Five years ago I was doing a lot more travel-heavy consulting work and I would have used this constantly. Instead of spending 40 minutes cross-referencing reviews from strangers with no context, I look at a curated map for five minutes and go outside.
Curation as a product decision
I think about Mapita the same way I think about scope decisions in product work. Every city guide that has tried to be everything has ended up being nothing much. The ones worth recommending have a clear idea of what “good” means and don’t budge on it.
That’s harder to pull off than it sounds. It means saying no to a lot of features, ignoring engagement metrics that would look good in a deck, and betting that quality compounds over time. Mapita seems to get this, and it comes through in how the thing actually feels to use.
If you’re currently working on a product and feeling the pressure to add one more thing, it’s worth spending ten minutes with how Mapita handles scope. They’ve kept it tight and the product is better for it.
As always, if you want to talk through product decisions with your team, or just need a restaurant recommendation in Lisbon, get in touch.