Tracking a Life of Travel with a Thunkable-Built App

Marco Ilagan spent 15 years climbing the corporate ladder but always dreamed of traveling the world. When Ilagan and his wife decided to make their dreams a reality, their travel blog, Map the Unknown, was born. They’ve now been full-time nomads for five years and realized that while their physical location was constantly changing, journaling helped them feel grounded. And with this realization, an app idea was born! 

“The app is called Nomad Journal. It's a journaling app for nomads for personal development,” Ilagan shared. “We've been traveling for five years, and we needed some way to balance our life because we are constantly moving, constantly changing environments, and we needed a way to balance our life. One of the things that really helps us is journaling. We created the journaling app that's catered for nomads that has motivational functionalities to set goals and to collect your travel memories all together in one app.”

Finding the Right Platform

Ilagan was no stranger to coding, having previously worked as a software developer, but it had been many years since he’d spent time coding.

“I was in an IT consulting company for 15 years. I started with very old coding techniques. I haven't coded for a long time, but I know all the concepts and technologies. I didn't want to invest my time again in learning how to code with the new technologies,” he explained. 

When IIagan began researching how to build their journal app, he found a few options but chose Thunkable because of the publishing capabilities.

IIagan said, “The [feature] that really impressed me was that I can publish [our app] both on Apple and Android. That's one thing that sold me on Thunkable.”

Building the Nomad Journal App 

Ilagan worked on the Nomad Journal app while adjusting to his new life of travel. Overall, he spent two years working on and refining the app.

He shared, “It took me two years, but I was not working on it full-time. I was working little by little. The whole roadmap took two years from conceptualization to creating the design. We got a graphic designer and then updated the design to finally have a minimum viable product that we can release to the App Store.” 

Favorite Part of Building on Thunkable 

Though he found many functionalities to enjoy about Thunkable, a few in particular stood out to Ilagan.

 He shared, “One of my favorite features is the ease of publishing to the App Store. That and the no code functionality. That was very cool. I like that you can call different APIs, and you can integrate with other platforms or other cloud technologies. And, I really like the community.”

To learn more about Marco IIagan’s travel lifestyle, check out his website Map the Unknown.

Build Your Own No Code Mobile App Using Thunkable

Ilagan has the Thunkable team dreaming of seeing the world and keeping track of our adventures with Nomad Journal.

Thunkable’s core belief is that great ideas are everywhere, and technology shouldn’t be a barrier to bring these ideas to life. As the best no code app builder, Thunkable allows you to easily create mobile apps without any coding experience.

Get started on Thunkable today!