One canvas for the whole arc of a trip
Dossi is a social travel-planning app I’m building with two co-founders from Imperial: Katie (CEO) and Karen (COO). It’s “part Figma, part scrapbook”: one open canvas where the dream, the plan, the group, and the memory of a trip all live in one place, instead of scattered across five apps and a group chat.
I’m the product and technical co-founder: brand, design system, prototype, and build. We’re live at go-dossi.com with a hands-on prototype and an open waitlist.
Inspiration lives everywhere. Planning doesn’t have to.
For Gen Z travellers, a trip has no home. It gets stitched together across TikTok and Instagram for inspiration, Google Maps for pins, a group chat to coordinate, the Notes app for pasted links, and a camera roll that never gets opened again. None of it connects.
The result: saved videos that never become plans, decisions that die in the group chat, and trips that vanish once they’re over. The hard part isn’t inspiration; it’s the gap between saving something and actually going. Dossi closes that gap by giving the whole arc of a trip one shared place.
What I own as product & technical co-founder
I sit where product, design, and engineering meet. I turn what we learn from users into decisions, then carry those decisions all the way to working software. Concretely, I own:
Two decisions shaped what Dossi is
Who: Gen Z first, Millennials second. Rather than hand-waving at a big market, my co-founders and I built a bottom-up model and segmented it, putting the market for Gen Z travel content, planning, and discovery at $15–20B. TikTok-native sharing and a strong social graph make Gen Z the ideal cold-start audience; Millennials carry higher LTV and monetise harder, so they come second. The same Gen Z-first → Millennial-monetisation sequence carried Beli and Letterboxd.
What: a social layer, not a better planner. Planning is already crowded: AI itinerary generators, Notion, Maps. What doesn’t exist is a social layer for travel: friends and family rank #1 for travel decisions, ahead of price, and no product bridges discovery-through-people-you-trust with the planning itself. I pulled apart every adjacent app (Spots, Amigo, Corner, Raya’s Places, Sensespace) against the three jobs the current workflow does badly: discover, plan, remember. Each owns one slice. Dossi competes at the intersection, with a canvas-based UX and no invite wall.
The risk I pressure-tested. Travel happens only a few times a year, so a social-travel app can struggle to build habit. The social layer has to earn attention between trips, through discovery and memory, not just planning. That insight shaped the discover → plan → remember loop the product is built around.
The identity has to make one app credible for dreaming and doing
In this category, competitors pick a lane: utility (TripIt, Wanderlog) or inspiration (TikTok, Pinterest saves). Dossi’s bet is holding both, which makes the brand a strategic problem, not a decorative one. The identity has to make a single app feel credible for dreaming and doing.
The name comes first: Dossi is short for dossier: the file you compile on a place before you go, and the record you keep after. Three criteria filtered the exploration: the brand had to feel like the trip rather than the logistics; it had to survive past the current trend cycle, because the product stores memories for years; and it had to recede behind user photography, because the content is the product.
I explored six directions across ~30 marks: rounded wordmarks, travel-object lockups (passports, luggage tags, tickets), and a family of postal stamps and seals. The stamp won the exploration – proof you went somewhere – but ultimately felt too literal to build the identity around: the final mark is the bare wordmark, with the postal language kept as texture rather than logo.
The coral era. The first hi-fi pass ran with the coral stamp brand. Structure landed immediately – canvas for dreaming, itinerary for doing – but the styling skewed too Gen Z to feel timeless: heavy shadows, emoji in the UI, coral reading loud rather than warm. A memory product ages with its first cohort: the styling that wins the download can date the archive. That tension became the rebrand brief.
The system as leverage. The rebrand kept the postal soul and stripped what dated it: charcoal ink on warm paper, Riviera blue as the signature accent, a pastel sticker palette for canvas pops. Each typeface has one job: Bricolage Grotesque for display, Archivo for UI, Archivo Black for stamps, Instrument Serif for accents. Every color pairing ships with its WCAG grade, so accessible choices are the default. As a solo designer also building the product, the system is what made speed possible.
What testing changed
We started from an unusual advantage: three Gen Z travellers who plan trips exactly this broken way. We treated it as a hypothesis to validate: interviews and a survey to map the real planning journey, then one round of reaction sessions on a mockup video of the prototype with 12 participants. That round reshaped the feature set more than any internal critique. Every decision below traces to a specific signal.
| Signal from testing | Insight | Decision |
|---|---|---|
| “Was the slanted text a design choice? I don’t like it.” | Playfulness was reading as sloppiness, not charm. | Straightened and simplified the canvas, and let this feed the broader strip-down of the brand. |
| Testers wanted a real plan, not sticky notes. | Scrapbook energy belongs to dreaming; the itinerary is for doing. | Rebuilt the itinerary as a timed, day-by-day layout with stops, notes, and bookings. |
| “Itineraries have a saved # to prove quality.” | Nobody acts on a stranger’s plan without a trust signal. | Public itineraries and explore cards carry save counts. |
| Testers wanted to tell friends and influencers what worked. | Post-trip knowledge is the content that compounds. | Every public itinerary stop gained a comment thread. |
| Planning ends where navigation begins. | Owning navigation would trap users, not serve them. | Place cards deep-link straight into Google or Apple Maps. |
| TikTok import went unnoticed. | The riskiest, most differentiating feature was hidden from the moment of need. | Moved social import into the main add-to-canvas flow; imported videos can be re-run to extract more places. |
Three jobs, one canvas
From the strategy I scoped the MVP around the three jobs the current workflow does badly: discover, plan & save, remember.
Discover. The riskiest assumption in our model was the save-to-plan gap, so the MVP’s anchor feature is reel import: paste a TikTok and Dossi extracts the places onto your canvas. We prioritised it over collaborative editing because it attacks the moment where the workflow actually breaks.
Plan & save. Saves organise automatically into one living map instead of a flat list – a deliberate trade against folder-style organisation, which our interviews showed people set up once and abandon.
Remember. The same collection that held the dream and the plan becomes the trip’s record – the answer to the habit risk: memory earns attention between trips, and a shareable record feeds the next person’s discovery, closing the loop.
The final prototype. The shipped prototype covers the full loop: an explore feed of real travelers’ canvases, a collaborative trip canvas, a structured itinerary with comments and ratings, a pin map, and place cards that carry bookings. Real photography replaced every placeholder. The product finally looks like what it stores: memories.
Live, and building
Reflections
Co-founding Dossi has been my clearest step from designer to product owner. The discipline that’s changed me most is sequencing: deciding what not to build yet. The market model and segmentation didn’t just validate the idea; they forced a beachhead, a GTM order, and the call to build a social product rather than another planner.
Owning the whole arc – brand, prototype, and code – taught me how much faster product decisions get when the person scoping the feature can also build it. And the biggest feature decisions all came out of one round of testing a mockup video: the cheapest research artifact I’ve made, and the highest yield.