Travel Buddy China — Student - Chinese students host authentic local experiences

Most China travel platforms push the same tourist checklist. Travel Buddy flips that — university students post their real plans (food crawls, hidden alleys, language swap over hotpot) and travelers join in. Hosts aren't tour guides. They're students who want to meet the world and show off their city. No booking fees, no fixed prices, no script. Two people figuring out a plan over DM. Built solo by a Shanghai accounting student. AI was the coding partner. No team, no funding.

Hey folks 👋 I'm Yiding, a junior accounting major in Shanghai. This summer I built Travel Buddy from scratch. The catch — I can't code. Every line came from talking to Claude and copy-pasting what worked. Why this exists: my non-Chinese friends visit Shanghai and get stuck. Not on the subway or the hotel, but on the simple stuff — what's that dish everyone's ordering, which alley has the weekend market, where do students actually hang out. Google's useless for this. A local fixes it in five minutes. Meanwhile I'm surrounded by classmates who'd love to show someone around and practice English. The two sides just needed to find each other. Tech is boring: Flask, SQLite, vanilla JS on a cheap cloud server. But the process was wild — I'd describe a feature in plain English, the AI would draft it, I'd test, break things, complain, and it would fix them. Rinse and repeat all summer. Honest feedback welcome: • Does the landing page make sense in 10 seconds? • What would keep you from signing up? • Been to China? Would you have used this? Thanks for reading 🙏

Travel Buddy China — Student - Chinese students host authentic local experiences

Replies