Detour
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Detour was a location-aware audio walking tour app founded by Groupon founder Andrew Mason. It offered immersive, GPS-triggered audio tours of neighborhoods - the narrator spoke at the user's walking pace as they moved along the route - with off-the-beaten-path tours for cities including San Francisco, Austin, New York, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, London and Marrakech. Walkers could sync audio over Bluetooth so groups heard the same narration simultaneously.
02 / Detour FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors supported by the current evidence
TechCrunch (24 Apr 2018): Andrew Mason's self-funded walking-tour app Detour was shutting down as the team (including Mason) had already spent ~six months on spin-out Descript; the article states the app never gained a sizable following versus other travel guides.
Mason and the Detour team had been working on Descript for around six months; Mason's focus shifted there as Detour shut down.
The app was never able to gain a sizable following on the scale of other travel guides (App Store Travel ranks in the 400s–700s).
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Acquisition
TechCrunch (24 Apr 2018): Bose acquired Detour software and tour content, not the team. The Detour app was to remain until 31 May 2018 then be removed from the App Store.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Around 2013-2014, Groupon founder Andrew Mason self-funded and launched Detour, a location-aware audio walking tour app with off-the-beaten-path tours in San Francisco and other cities.
- 02
Mason later discovered a better product while editing tour audio: Descript, an audio-editing tool, which he spun off in December 2017 with $5 million from Andreessen Horowitz - leaving Detour in limbo.
- 03
In 2018, Bose acquired Detour's software and content to fold its location-based audio experiences into Bose's new audio-AR platform.
- 04
The Detour app was made free until May 31, 2018, then discontinued and left unsupported. No reliable loss figure was disclosed, so no loss amount is recorded.