Ana Vershinina grew up in Sortavala, a town of about 20,000 people, where her childhood was hiking, lake swimming and picking berries with her family. She has written that she spent that childhood thinking about the rest of the world, and that if anyone had told her fifteen years earlier she would end up building a travel planning app she would not have believed them.

The actual idea arrived much later, while she was planning a 21 day road trip across Germany. She wanted more than a list of sights: a route with good stops, local food, cultural detail, realistic timing and a budget that held together. Planning that one trip took about two months of evenings after work, and she ended up with a large spreadsheet and a pile of scattered notes on her phone. She tried several existing planners along the way and none of them turned a feeling into a route. That gap became FlapTrip, an app that asks how you like to travel and returns a day by day plan in about 60 seconds with real places and mapped routes.

FlapTrip was built by a very small team on top of full time jobs. In her posts Ana describes three people: herself on operations, marketing, content, user research and customer development, Andrew Korolev turning ideas into product decisions, and Konstantin Karimov, the Flutter developer who designed the architecture and wrote most of the app. The company site now lists a fourth co founder on backend and AI. Ana was 27 and working full time as a QA engineer at another startup she says she genuinely liked. FlapTrip happened in evenings, on weekends and on public holidays. Her own summary of the schedule: Monday to Friday someone else's startup, evenings walking the dog and building, weekends and holidays their startup, days off do not exist.

Validation was low tech. In July 2025 she posted a short early user survey on LinkedIn and asked people who love travel to fill it in. In October 2025 she went public with the project itself, calling it her pet project, publishing the origin story on Medium and openly asking her network for help with Reddit, TikTok and Instagram because she had never done that kind of marketing before. There was no funding round and no investors behind any of this.

The build ran long. Her clearest line about it: "We thought we'd build it in six months, but in reality it took us eleven haha." Three months before launch the pressure caught up with her. She has written that she stopped believing in the product and in herself, kept holding the team together anyway, reviewed every screen and every piece of copy, and only told her co founders she was burned out right before launch. Their answer was that they already knew.

FlapTrip reached the App Store on 26 March 2026, with more than a thousand people on the waitlist and coverage of 60,000 plus destinations. The Android version followed on 31 March. Pricing is freemium: a free tier that covers two trips a month of up to five days, and a PRO tier with twenty trips a month of up to fourteen days, sold as in app subscriptions starting at $1.99.

Eleven days after the App Store launch, on 6 April 2026, Ana posted the first honest scoreboard: 700 installs and three people on PRO. She was blunt about where the installs came from, writing that most of them were friends, family and coworkers, the same people who had liked her launch post on LinkedIn. Those three PRO subscribers are the first paying customers this story is anchored on. The 345 days in the milestone below combine her own two dates: eleven months of building before launch, plus the eleven days from the App Store release to that post.

What makes the post worth reading is the list of things she got wrong, published while the numbers were still small. They shipped the MVP with no event tracking at all, which she describes as launching a product and then closing your eyes. They never built a feedback loop, and then waited for feedback that never arrived on its own. They launched in Sweden and Germany because that is where team members happened to live, not because either market had search demand, so they had no keyword rankings where travel planning is actually searched for and started rebuilding distribution around the UK. And they stuffed "AI trip planner" into every App Store keyword field before checking the data, only to find that people search "trip planner" and "itinerary" instead. Her conclusion was that she would rather learn all of this at 700 installs than at 70,000.

The story stops there, honestly, because that is where the public record stops. Ana has not posted revenue figures, and by July 2026 she was still asking her network for help finding creators and channels for a young app in a hard market. FlapTrip is a first paying customer story, not a growth story, and it is useful precisely for that reason: it shows what the first eleven days after a side project launch really look like when nobody is rounding up.