A Solo Founder in Pune Built an iPad Travel Scrapbook App From Scratch

Who built it, and what they built

Sudipto Paul is the founder and product owner of Routespunkt, the company behind the Routespunkt Notebook app, which is sold exclusively through the iPad App Store. The business is based in Pune and runs with no employees and one cofounder listed on the business panel.

The company itself was set up to handle the work that continues after an app ships, specifically advertising and tax filing. The founder points out that with more than 2 million apps in the App Store, paid ads can reach far more potential customers than store optimization alone for a newly launched product.

Where the idea came from

Paul's path into software started after graduating in 1997 as a mechanical engineer, when an extracurricular C language course pulled him toward computers. He built a career as a test automation consultant and manager, and first subscribed to an iOS programming YouTube channel in 2013, writing his first iOS Hello World program somewhere between then and 2019.

In 2019 he left his last project and employer and faced a fork: continue the consulting path or build something of his own. He spent a few months refreshing his programming skills with Python and Java, then gravitated toward mobile apps, with travel as the theme that kept surfacing because of his interest in digital maps.

As a solo developer he picked Swift over Android, drawn by the Apple ecosystem and the fun of learning a new language, taking online courses from Chris Ching and Udemy. His first product, built over close to a year, was an excursion tracker where cycling or camping companions could see each other on a map, but the pandemic made a team-dependent product unworkable.