I'm Zhantai. I founded Tourricon, a marketplace where travellers book tours in Kyrgyzstan straight from local guides and small tour companies: no agents in between, every tour moderated, reviews only from people who actually went.
I design it, build it and ship it. It is live, so the fastest way to judge it is to open it.
Every card opens the working product.
The Tourricon codebase in November 2026. The code is proprietary, so its repository is private; I am glad to walk through it on a call.
Live. A GitHub Action redraws this chart every morning from my contribution calendar, private repositories included. The numbers behind it are in data/pulse.json.
01 · I'm an investor — the brief
The problem. Travellers find tours in Kyrgyzstan through agents, random chats and Instagram: prices are opaque and reviews cannot be trusted. Local guides and small tour companies struggle to sell online and give up 20–30% to agents.
What Tourricon does. A catalog of moderated tours. A request goes straight to the organizer, to their dashboard and to Telegram, and the traveller pays the organizer directly, with no platform commission. Only a traveller with a completed trip can leave a review.
What already works. The catalog and moderation, requests with a Telegram bot, reviews and ratings, three languages, and dashboards for travellers, organizers, moderators and admins. It is a working product, not a slide deck.
How it makes money. Listing is free today, while supply and demand gather in one place. The revenue it is built towards: paid tour promotion, tools for organizers, and partner services for travellers such as eSIM, tickets and insurance.
The ask. Tourricon is looking for an early-stage investor. The numbers, the team and the 12-month plan are best shared in person or on a call.
02 · I run tours — list them for free
Listing is free for the first organizers on Tourricon. A traveller picks a date and sends a request; it lands in your dashboard and in Telegram, and you confirm it with one tap. You are paid directly, and reviews come only from travellers who went with you.
03 · I'm planning a trip — find a guide
Hiking, horses, lakes, day trips out of Bishkek: tours across Issyk-Kul, Naryn, Chuy and beyond, in English, Russian and Kyrgyz. You deal with the guide, not with a middleman.
04 · I'm an engineer — the stack and how I work
| Layer | What runs there |
|---|---|
| App | TanStack Start, React 19, TypeScript, Vite |
| Interface | Tailwind CSS 4, shadcn/ui, Radix |
| Data | Supabase: Postgres with row-level security and edge functions, Drizzle |
| Messaging | A Telegram bot and Mini App, transactional email |
| Quality | A Playwright end-to-end suite that runs against a local copy of the database |
| Delivery | Cloudflare Workers; every push to main is built and deployed |
I work AI-natively. Coding agents write most of the diffs; I own the product, the architecture and the review, and the end-to-end suite keeps every change honest. That is how one person ships at this pace.
Also in the workshop: Fit-Fresh, a Telegram Mini App for a fitness coach (workouts, progress tracking, a PRO plan).
Before Tourricon
- 2026. Data work in Python: raindetector-2.0, a rain-event pipeline that keeps running on fallback data when its weather source is down. A small blockchain in Rust.
- 2022. Client websites in Bishkek: a restaurant site with a cart, payments and search, a market site, an agency site, an NFT marketplace front end. iOS demos in Swift.
- Student at CZU in Prague; before that, the Faculty of IT at BUT.
Write to connect@tourricon.com. The cards on this page are drawn by scripts/build.py; the typeface is Manrope, under the SIL Open Font License.