Meet Umut Türemen | Co-founder of Tourist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Umut Türemen and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Umut, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
When I graduated from high school, as an 18-year-old person, it was not easy to decide what I really want. I spent almost 12 years as a professional basketball player and I always wanted to stay as one and keep basketball in my life as my profession. I was also very successful in the academy, and I managed to join Istanbul Technical University, one of the best universities in Turkey. It was time for me to move to a different city and start a new life. When I quit basketball, I really felt an enormous empty space in my life. Something inside me was pushing me to spend my energy. One day, I saw a startup idea competition in my university’s incubation center. Until that point, I have never thought about generating a business idea. However, I realized that I have done a lot of stuff to earn money such as selling video games and toy collections. At that point, it took a couple of minutes to generate a new idea just to apply to this competition. Since then it was always my dream to have my own business.

What should our readers know about your business?
Tourist App allows users to virtually travel to cities all around the World. You can visit all cities in the application while listening to their local radios. You can also see places to visit in the cities, watch their videos and read information about them. More than 10.000 users in 95 countries are currently using Tourist App and discovering the World already. So far, this success has been achieved only with organic growth without any marketing budget.

In the future, we would like to create one of the first crypto token integrated travel applications. Users will be able to earn and trade crypto tokens by sharing their travel experiences, making reservations, and interacting with other users. Our vision is to lead the transformation of the travel industry through the new technologies of metaverse and crypto chains. Our team is aiming to develop itself on the most critical topics to create a better travel experience for all tourists.

Once our team implements the partner system with tourism stakeholders (hotels, tour companies, airlines, bus companies, etc.), it is planned to add special features for physical travelers. For example, a user who decides to travel to New York will be able to plan his/her trip through our application and make hotel, restaurant, tour, and museum reservations. Additionally, the users will be able spend their tokens to get discounts on these reservations.

Tourist App recently completed its crowdfunding campaign and raised 2.000.000 Turkish Liras, which is approximately $110.000. Our team would like to use this budget to develop the new app interface, marketing and blockchain technology integration. For us, the most exciting part will be the ICO (initial coin offering) of our Tourist Token once it is ready.

Of course, this journey was not easy at all. After covid took over the World, people were trapped in their home and cancelled their vacation plans. We came up with the idea of virtual travel and realized a huge gap on the market. We couldn’t find a good mobile application or a web service that allows people to travel virtually in the way we want. So we decided to build one. Currently, we have several competitors, but they are mostly focused on video content of the cities. Meanwhile, we promote touristic information, using gamification to improve user’s general culture, let our users to make travel plans and share their real experiences. Of course, top of the cake, the token integration makes us unique. We also give local businesses and small cities to have a chance to promote themselves in the application. The biggest lesson we learned during this journey was just working hard. Currently, we as 2 co-founders studying at Technical University of Munich in our master’s degree, working part time to cover our expenses and building this startup. Sometimes we don’t know how to solve the problem in front of us. But we know we can learn how to solve it. The only thing we needed was being able to understand English and using internet. That’s it.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
This is a great question. Cause if this friend of mine was using Tourist App, s/he wouldn’t be worried about where s/he should visit 🙂

I am living in Munich for almost 2 years. I would take my friend to Englisher Garden since it is a great natural park. We can say it is the Central Park of Munich. We would go to the Brenner, which is one of my favorite restaurants in Munich. Probably at the end, we could close the night with a nightclub, which would be Heart Nightclub. The next day we would definitely leverage the great museums in Munich.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I appreciate my family for being with me whenever I need them. Throughout my whole life, I felt their support and got stronger.

Of course, the biggest credit for Tourist is going to Mert Akman, my co-founder of Tourist and our great team.

Website: https://www.touristapplication.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/touristapplication/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/touristapplication/?viewAsMember=true

Twitter: https://twitter.com/touristapp_

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/touristapplication

Other: Our corporate email is join@touristapplication.com