Know if a place is worth it, before you go.

Indians took 295 crore domestic trips in 2024. We are always going somewhere: a wedding, a long weekend, the trip the group chat has been “planning” since January. But the planning itself is a mess. You save reels, open ten tabs, message a cousin, and still land up in Manali in peak season with no decent room and a four-hour jam on the way out. Inspiration, we have plenty of. What's missing is the useful part. Is this place actually right for me, right now?

Watch how a trip actually gets planned here and the gap is obvious. Instagram makes you fall for a place in fifteen seconds but tells you nothing about your dates. Maps gets you there but won't say whether it's worth going. Booking apps sell you what you've already chosen. Blogs are generic and often years old. Everybody owns a slice of the journey, and all of them quietly step around the one hard part, which is the decision. That is the gap Raasta is built for.

Open Rishikesh for next weekend from Delhi and the whole picture is right there. The weather is good, the overnight bus is your best bet, the trip runs about ₹8,000, you should base yourself in Tapovan rather than the main market, carry a light jacket, and skip the Sunday-evening drive back. None of it is generated on the spot. It is researched, written, and kept current, so you just read it, save it, or forward it to the group. Before any place earns a spot in Raasta, it has to answer six questions.

The biggest call was not a screen. It was the plumbing underneath. Instead of writing travel articles, I made every destination structured data: the best months, the costs, the stay zones, the routes, and the things that quietly ruin a trip. That one decision carries most of the product. Because a place is a proper building block, the same well-built place can power a weekend trip and a ten-day journey from one source. And every correction a traveller sends back makes it sharper, which is hard for a copycat to shortcut.

Most trips in India now are the quick kind, a Friday-to-Sunday reset rather than the once-a-year holiday. But people still want the long, proper trip too, so Raasta does both. A Trip is built around one base, with a plan you follow hour by hour. A Journey is the multi-stop version: several places strung into one route, in the right order, with distances, drive times, and how you'll get between them. Raasta works out the route, the timing, and the budget. It does not book anything. That part stays in your hands.

Every place and journey gets one number, built from what actually decides a trip: the weather for your dates, how long it takes to reach, how crowded it will be, and how well it fits what you are after. Never likes, never ad spend, never who paid us. The day a tourism board can buy a better score, the number is worthless and so are we, so we simply don't sell it. That single rule shapes more of the product than any screen does.

Raasta is not trying to replace the apps you already use. It sits in the one gap they all leave open, the part where you decide, and hands off cleanly to the rest.

The hardest call for a founder-designer is not what to build. It is what to leave out. An app is a lot to build on a hunch, so I didn't start there. The first thing we shipped is the website: mobile-first, quick, easy to forward, and sharp enough that a stranger reads it and leaves their email. That is the first honest proof, real demand and a real audience, before a single rupee goes into the app.

Visit the live site at raasta.app ↗

Raasta is the one project where I own every layer: the idea, the market call, the data model, the brand, and the pixels. The thing I keep relearning is how much of the design happens before anything is drawn. The decision that mattered most here had nothing to do with layout. It was widening the product from journeys-only to a place-first library of trips and journeys, and then keeping the launch small enough to actually ship.

If it works, the payoff is bigger than a tidy planner. Give people a plan they trust and they get a little braver. They skip the usual Goa or Manali loop for a valley in Kashmir, and a small part of that 295-crore-trip spend finally reaches the towns and local guides that need it most.

For now the waitlist is open, the graph is filling in, and the real work is the slow kind: earning trust one honest trip at a time. That is exactly the work I want to be doing. Built with my co-founder, Siddharth Singh.