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Ana Vershinina

Ana Vershinina

From a spreadsheet-heavy road-trip plan to FlapTrip, an AI travel planner built on evenings, weekends and public holidays.

Country
Serbia
Known for
Co-founding FlapTrip
Industry
Travel tech
Role
Co-founder, Operations & Marketing

A childhood spent thinking about the world

Ana Vershinina grew up in Sortavala, a town of about 20,000 people, hiking, swimming in lakes and picking berries with her family. She has written that she spent those years thinking about the rest of the world, and that she would not have believed she would one day build a travel planning app.

The idea: a 21-day road trip across Germany

The idea came 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 and left her with a huge spreadsheet and scattered notes on her phone. Existing planners, she found, did not turn a travel mood into a route. That gap became FlapTrip, an app that asks how you like to travel and returns a day-by-day plan with real places and mapped routes in about 60 seconds.

Building on top of a full-time job

At the time, Ana was 27 and working full time as a QA engineer at another startup. FlapTrip was built in the margins: evenings, weekends and public holidays. She leads operations, marketing, content and user research. The product is owned by co-founder Andrew Korolev, the app and its architecture are built by Flutter developer Konstantin Karimov, and Andrei Tashlanov works on the backend and the AI behind trip planning. There was no funding round and no investors.

Validating in public

Validation was low-tech. In July 2025 she shared a short survey on LinkedIn asking travel lovers for input. In October 2025 she went public with the project, telling its origin story on Medium and openly asking her network for help with Reddit, TikTok and Instagram marketing, an area she had never worked in before.

Eleven months, not six

The team expected to build the product in six months. It took eleven. About three months before launch, the pressure caught up with Ana: she lost confidence in the product and in herself, kept the team together anyway, and told her co-founders she was burned out only just before launch.

Launch and the first eleven days

FlapTrip reached the App Store on 26 March 2026, with more than 1,000 people on the waitlist and over 60,000 destinations covered. The Android version followed on 31 March. It is freemium: the free tier covers two trips a month of up to five days, while PRO allows twenty trips a month of up to fourteen days, sold as in-app subscriptions from $1.99.

On 6 April, eleven days after launch, Ana posted an honest scoreboard: about 700 installs and three PRO subscribers. She was open that most installs came from friends, family and coworkers. She also listed what went wrong: no event tracking at launch, no feedback loop, launch markets (Sweden and Germany) chosen because teammates lived there rather than because people search for trip planning there, and app store keywords packed with "AI" terms instead of what people actually search. She started refocusing distribution on the UK.

Mission

FlapTrip's stated mission is to take care of the routine part of trip planning so travellers can focus on the fun part: choosing the mood, exploring new places, adding personal stops and making each trip their own.

Timeline

By the numbers

The takeaway: early installs from friends measure goodwill, not demand, so track everything from day one. Ana's open post about her mistakes also shows how sharing real numbers early can build trust before the growth arrives.

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Sources

Written from public information, including Startup Founder Stories and FlapTrip's About page. Further reading: Ana Vershinina on Medium and her LinkedIn post. FlapTrip has not published revenue figures, so none are shown here.