A Chat With Orit Gal, Founder at City Organiser App: Urbaniser

Meet Urbaniser: The ultimate app for all foodies, art lovers, shoppers, and urban explorers – simply organise the places you need and love, in any city in the world:
  • Create personal city collections for all the places you need and love
  • Organise all your places into easily managed categories
  • Navigate effortlessly from place to place and quickly add new discoveries on the go
  • Recommend whole collections, specific categories or special places to friends with one click
As we emerge out of lockdown, safe exploration and unique and memorable experiences have never been so important. This summer, it’s all about making the most of our exciting UK Cities.
Part of what makes living in or close to a city so special are the unique experiences that wait for us at every corner – the hole in the wall little finds that only we know about. City life is all about the places that are ours, with each of us naturally curating our unique city playlists based on our specific lifestyle needs and personal tastes.
Introducing Urbaniser. Urbaniser allows the user to simply store all their favourite places on one platform with geolocations, open-source data, photos, and notes – making it more likely for the user to follow through. Urbaniser is your personal space, no busy feeds, no followers and no likes.

 
 

Urbaniser Home
 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
My lightbulb moment for Urbaniser was on a work trip to New York City, I decided to stay the weekend and was super excited to make the most of it. Obviously, I checked out my go-to sources, from magazines to blogs, to friends. But by the time I got there, all the great recommendations I found were scattered across different lists, notes, links, and messages. I had to figure out what I had saved where when I wanted to go out and explore the city.

What was the name of that bar so and so told me about? Where was that fab lunch place I’ve read about? Or the amazing boutique I passed by yesterday but didn’t have time to go into? What I was missing were not recommendations, they were everywhere. What I needed was just a simple tool to manage them all.

I started looking at existing solutions, couldn’t find a good one and naively thought – how hard could it be?- Initially, I thought of it as a fun little side project, but gradually it took over my life. 

After a few iterations, starts and stops, Urbaniser eventually began to take shape in 2018 and was fully developed by early 2020 – a simple yet smart list-making app for saving, organizing, and sharing any place in any city in the world, think of it as your personal little black book of places, always there in your pocket.

 

 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 

We were initially ready to launch just as the pandemic started but quickly it became apparent that there would be absolutely no need for Urbaniser for quite a while. After so much work and anticipation, this was obviously soul-crushing, but we quickly decided to pick ourselves up and see what we can use the “extra time” for.

All the focus was about taking it to the next level – improving the product itself, building partnerships, and most importantly for me, figuring out what’s next – what would a post-pandemic city life look like? What would people and places need? How could Urbaniser become a useful tool as we venture out of lockdown.

In that sense, launching now, I believe we have a much stronger product and a much better roadmap on how to bring it to market.

 

 What can we hope to see from Urbaniser in the future?

 

Urbaniser at its essence is all about helping city lovers enjoy the unique places they need and love. We want to become both the natural go-to tool for people to curate their lifestyle and passions, but also a personal space for directly communicating with their favourite places. Over the next 12 months we’ll be publishing new features adding to the already built curation process, but also integrating more information about the events, pop-ups and special experiences happening across any urbanised places.

We can’t wait to see people enjoying the app and the dream I had become a reality as I see people using it as they explore cities and re-discover travel.