Mobility / Travel · AI Product · Live

JourneyPal

Relocation stress comes from fragmented information, not from the process being inherently hard. Acting on that meant shipping something far smaller than the pitch.

Role: Product & build
Origin: Product Management Fundamentals, Colab Cohorts
Stack: Next.js · Supabase · Claude API · Vercel
Status: Live at journeypal.co

JourneyPal: The product as it stands. Note what the headline commits to: — The product as it stands. Note what the headline commits to: one destination country, a fixed number of steps, and a price. Every one of those is a decision that the original pitch had deliberately left open.

Context

JourneyPal began as a case study pitch for a product management certification, where the brief was to find a real pain point and design a product around it. I picked relocation because I had been through it, and because the difficulty was easy to describe and hard to locate.

Clear information on visa eligibility, timelines, accommodation and country-specific regulation is scattered across sources, which leaves people confused and unprepared to plan effectively.

Hypothesis and validation

My hypothesis, shaped by personal experience, was that relocation stress comes from the lack of centralised, reliable information rather than the process itself being inherently hard.

To validate it I ran informal interviews, surveys in Facebook relocation community groups, and focus groups digging into specific friction points: visas, accommodation timelines, resource fragmentation. Findings consistently pointed to the same root cause: fragmented information and manual, ad hoc preparation.

Nobody described the process as too hard. They described it as impossible to feel finished with.

JourneyPal: The wireframe from the certification work, and the one thing — The wireframe from the certification work, and the one thing from it that survived intact. Splitting a move into before you leave, on the day, and on arrival gives a person somewhere to stop, which is the direct answer to not being able to feel finished.

JourneyPal: plate 1 — Segments, MVP definition, roadmap and risk register from the pitch. Read together they show the shape of the original proposal: two customer types, an open destination pair, and a generated plan document as the deliverable.

JourneyPal: plate 2 — Segments, MVP definition, roadmap and risk register from the pitch. Read together they show the shape of the original proposal: two customer types, an open destination pair, and a generated plan document as the deliverable.

The pitch worked as a pitch and would not have worked as a product. A checklist for everywhere is accurate nowhere.

What changed on the way to shipping

The proposal served two audiences at once, people relocating and the immigration advisers selling to them, and it treated the destination as a variable. That is a reasonable thing to argue in a deck and an impossible thing to keep correct in a live product, because the steps that matter are the ones tied to a specific visa in a specific country.

So the build cut in three places. One corridor, New Zealand to Korea, which is the move I had actually made. One audience, students, whose visa route and timing are consistent enough to write real steps against. One artefact, a thirty-item tracker across four phases, instead of a generated plan document.

JourneyPal: The narrowing, stated on the page. Each group is named by it — The narrowing, stated on the page. Each group is named by its visa or programme rather than by demographics, because that is the only thing that changes what the checklist has to say. A D-2 student and an exchange student need different steps in a different order.

Pricing as a product decision

The free tier holds the five essential pre-arrival items. The full thirty steps unlock for a one-time nineteen dollars, and an optional community sits at seven dollars a month after a free first month.

The split follows the shape of the problem. A move ends, so the tracker is bought once rather than rented. Arriving somewhere does not end, so the only recurring charge is attached to the only thing that continues.

JourneyPal: Three tiers, and the middle one carries the product. The fre — Three tiers, and the middle one carries the product. The free items sit before departure, where anxiety is highest and willingness to pay is lowest, so the tracker has to earn the nineteen dollars before it asks for it.

Where it stands

Live at journeypal.co, built with Claude Code, hosted on Vercel, with Supabase behind it and the Claude API powering the product's AI functionality.

The open question is whether the narrowing was the right size. One corridor makes the content defensible and the market small, and the honest test of that is whether students who finish the tracker stay for the part that comes after the move.