From planning frustration to a working product
Parcours didn't start with a pitch deck. It started with too many tabs open, conflicting forum advice, and a genuine question about whether better planning software was actually possible.
Why this exists
Cycling trip planning sits in an awkward middle ground. There's no shortage of inspiration — YouTube, Instagram, forums, route-sharing platforms — but very little that helps a rider make the specific decisions that actually determine whether a trip goes well.
The gap isn't information. It's judgement. Which destination fits your fitness? Which base town minimises transfer friction? How do you structure days that are ambitious without being reckless? These are the decisions that planning tools largely don't help with — they either show routes, or they show inspiration, but they don't reason.
The timeline
Before 2024
Trip planning was already part of the enjoyment
Long before this was a product, researching a cycling trip was a ritual in itself — comparing regions, mapping out cols, working out logistics. The research was time-consuming, but it was also part of the anticipation. No one wanted to skip it.
2024
One multi-location trip took roughly two months to plan part-time
A trip with three bases across two countries involved spreadsheets, scattered notes, forum threads, maps, and a lot of back-and-forth. Not because the information was hard to find, but because no single tool held it together or helped weigh the real tradeoffs.
2024
ChatGPT helped — but it wasn't the engine
Used for drafting logistics lists, sanity-checking route density, and bouncing itinerary ideas around. Helpful at the margins, but not reliable enough to trust for trip decisions. The context window was too short, the knowledge too broad, and the outputs too inconsistent to build anything around.
2025
An injury created space to test whether structured AI could help
Time off the bike meant time to run real experiments. Testing different AI-assisted planning flows showed something worth building — but the sandbox had hard limits. No persistent memory, no structured access to route data, no real planning state that survived a session.
2026
New prototyping workflows made a working product possible
What changed was the development speed, not the ambition. Faster iteration cycles meant the gap between idea and working software finally closed. The question shifted from "can we build it?" to "does this actually solve the planning problem?" — a much better question to be solving.
Start from a real planning question
Origin stories are easy to over-tell. The thing that matters is whether the product actually helps — whether it makes your next trip easier to plan and more likely to go well. That's what Parcours is for.
No polish. No pitch deck. Just the real path from planning frustration to a working tool — and whether it actually helps is still the only question that matters.