Andrew Tran’s girlfriend was getting a little bored of the standard date night.
“She challenged me to come up with better date ideas other than dinner and a movie,” Tran said. “I was like, 'Fine, I can take on that challenge.' But I found it a little bit frustrating to actually find cool things to do.”
After painstakingly combing the internet for ideas and exploring various areas around the city, he developed some fresh adventures. He would document his trips on a blog, posting pictures and detailing his finds. Over time, they took on the feel of a travel guide for locals and Tran decided to turn his excursions into a business.
Project Nande is a membership club that sends out new excursions weekly. The trips range from journeys through a neighborhood’s best bookstores to hidden green spaces in the middle of the city.
Tran sees the guide as helping people who are visiting Chicago for a second or third time find something new.
“They're kind of done with the Bean and doing the Willis Tower and all that sort of typical touristy stuff,” he said. “This is for people who come to Chicago and really want to see how to experience the city as a local and explore parts of Chicago that they may not have thought of.”
While tourists may find the guides valuable, residents both new and old have plenty to gain from checking them out. They may find new favorite hangouts, get introduced to awesome art and travel neighborhoods they would have otherwise avoided.
Project Nande offers a few guides for free, including an exploration of the abandoned Damen Silos. However, if users want new guides weekly, they’ll have to pay $7 per month. For those that want a little more personalization, users can also access a concierge service starting at $12 per month.
With the concierge service, users get a number they can text whenever they’re out exploring so they can get tips on where to go, what to see and or even book last-minute tickets while you spend an extra hour at the museum. And as the community grows, Tran hopes to lead in-person guided excursions, bringing together urban explorers from across the city to focus on a specific neighborhood.
The club officially launched last week and Tran plans to work out the finer points of the membership and test the market before one day expanding to other cities.
So far, he bootstrapped the site along with his technical co-founder Chris Stavitsky. It's a nights-and-weekend project for them for now: during the day, Tran works at Aon on projects coming out their data and analytics innovation center, while Stavitsky is a software engineer at Enova.
And Tran's girlfriend, who started all this? She’s now his wife, and she still comes along on each of Tran’s trips around the city.
Image via Project Nande
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