The Story

The Original Idea

TourGraph started in early 2026 as supply-side infrastructure for the tours and experiences industry. The thesis: tour operators are invisible to AI agents. Nobody is building the pipes to make 300,000+ tour experiences queryable by ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. I'd build an extraction pipeline, structure the data, and serve it via an MCP server.

The tech worked. I built an AI extraction pipeline using Claude that pulled structured data from operator websites with 95% accuracy. Integrated the Viator Partner API. Had 83 products from 7 Seattle operators with full scorecards. The domain was bought. The API key was live.

The Competitive Analysis That Said “Kill It”

Then I did what every builder should do before going deeper: a proper competitive analysis. The findings were brutal. Peek had already launched a live MCP server with 300,000+ experiences. TourRadar shipped theirs covering 50,000 tours. Expedia published an MCP server on GitHub. Magpie Travel was building operator-side MCP infrastructure.

The claim “nobody is building this” was perhaps true in mid-2025. By February 2026, four companies were actively shipping. The window had closed.

The honest conclusion of my own competitive analysis: “pivot or kill, but don't double down.”

The Pivot

I had $200 invested. A working Viator API integration. A domain. And a dataset of tour experiences that was genuinely fun to browse. While testing the extraction pipeline, I kept getting distracted by the tours themselves — a midnight kayaking trip through bioluminescent bays in Puerto Rico, a 4-day Inca Trail trek, fairy hunting in Iceland with a certified elf spotter.

The question shifted: what if the product isn't infrastructure for AI agents, but something that makes humans smile? Not a booking engine. Not a travel planner. Not a recommendation engine. Just a place you visit because the world is weird, beautiful, and surprising — and someone should be showing you that.

What Emerged

TourGraph became a consumer site built around four ideas: zero friction (no signup, no tracking), instant smiles (warm and witty, never cynical), effortlessly shareable (every tour has a beautiful link preview), and rabbit hole energy (that “one more click” quality through genuine curiosity).

Tour Roulette gives you a random tour with one button press. Right Now Somewhere shows you what's happening where it's golden hour. The World's Most ___ surfaces daily superlatives. Six Degrees of Anywhere connects any two cities through a chain of tours with surprising thematic links.

The name finally earned itself — not as a supply-side data graph, but as a web of surprising connections between places, experiences, and cultures.

How It's Built

Next.js with React Server Components. SQLite as a pre-built local index (no API calls at page load — sub-50ms queries). Viator Partner API for 300,000+ experiences. Claude for AI-generated one-liners and thematic chain connections. TypeScript throughout. Dark mode because photos pop.

The entire stack is deliberately simple. No user database. No authentication. No analytics beyond what's needed. The complexity budget goes toward one thing: making the content delightful.

The Success Metric

TourGraph doesn't have KPIs. The success metric is vibes: friends texting each other links, someone at a dinner party saying “have you seen this site?”, a Reddit post titled “I just lost an hour on this weird tour website.” And honestly — the builder having fun building it.