Planned Trips v1, Country Guides, New Destinations

This sprint I was moving around again, but two big foundations landed: planned trips (community spine) and a major expansion of country and destination guides.

🚀 What Shipped

• Planned Trips v1 is live. Plan an upcoming trip and opt in to show up on the community map. Destination pages now surface locals and travelers so the map starts feeling inhabited and sets the field for buddy connections.
• Country Guides Live: 24 countries now have deeper, planning-focused country deep-dives - not just a listing of dives posts.
• Destination guide expansion: 23 destination guides shipped across Indonesia (5), Portugal (11), and the United States (7).

🌍 Community Foundations

Planned Trips v1

Trips are the next layer of the community system:

• Add an upcoming trip (location + date range)
• Show up on the community map (privacy-aware)
• See other divers in the area and people heading to the same destination soon

This is the foundation for buddy discovery and eventually smarter spot/shop suggestions tied to where you’re actually going.

🧭 Product Features

Country guides (24 upgraded)

If you saw the country pages before, they were pretty bare and basically overwhelming grids of dive spots. These new guides are designed to be actual planning resources for your trips that also link cleanly into destinations and spots.

Start here:

• Explore countries: https://divejourney.io/countries

Highlights with destination expansions:

• United States of America: https://divejourney.io/countries/united-states-of-america
• Indonesia: https://divejourney.io/countries/indonesia
• Portugal: https://divejourney.io/countries/portugal

🏝️ New Destinations

Now that I have country level guides flow working, I ‘m expanding country by country to get the most comprehensive guides possible.

Focused on: Indonesia, United States of America, and Portugal.

United States of America

• Key Largo
• Key West
• Miami
• Palm Beach
• San Diego and La Jolla
• Monterey Bay
• Lake Tahoe

Indonesia

• Tulamben and Amed (Bali)
• Padangbai and Candidasa (Bali)
• Gili Islands
• Bunaken and Manado - North Sulawesi
• Derawan Islands

Portugal

• Madeira
• Porto Santo
• Algarve (Lagos)
• Sesimbra
• Peniche and Berlengas
• Lisbon Coast (Cascais)
• Terceira (Azores)
• Faial (Azores)
• Pico (Azores)
• Santa Maria (Azores)
• Flores (Azores)

🔭 What’s Next

• Continue the community layer - next up is buddy finder v1 and messaging users within the app to connect
• Explore building out a leaderboard, with more contributions and logging coming in this could be fun
• Expand shop map embeds with early partner shops and learn what works best on their websites
• Expand country/destination guides

Founder Shiplog #2

Let's Connect

This last week again had lots of solid convos with new users with some cool feature ideas that I’m working into future sprints. If you want to keep up with what's going on at DiveJourney or connect by email, sign up for the newsletter below.