Andrew Mason's Audio Tour App Detour Steers You Away From The Typical Tourist Traps
I'm about 20 minutes late when I meet Andrew Mason at the famous Boudin Bakery in San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf district. It's a tourist trap, but it's where Mason wants to meet and who am I to complain?
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Andrew Mason's first public product since Groupon fired him as CEO in March 2013, four-plus years after he founded the company in 2008. The TechCrunch sit-down at Fisherman's Wharf's Boudin Bakery works as a soft preview: Detour is an audio walking-tour app pitched explicitly against the tourist-trap circuit.
For a pre-launch profile of an unreleased app, the pickup was unusually broad — The Verge, Re/code, Businessweek, VentureBeat and WebProNews all ran versions within days — which says more about curiosity surrounding Mason's second act than about the product itself.
First-order effects
- Mason re-enters consumer tech with Detour, and every writeup measures the app against the Groupon record that ended with his dismissal, making the founder's redemption narrative inseparable from the product launch.
- San Francisco visitors get a concrete alternative to guidebook staples like Fisherman's Wharf, with audio walks routed toward lesser-known stops instead.
Second-order effects
- Coverage across Businessweek, Re/code and The Verge hands an unlaunched app outsized visibility, raising expectations — and the cost of a weak reception — for its official debut.
- Any incumbent in the city-tour market now faces a competitor whose distribution advantage is press attention rather than paid acquisition.
Third-order effects
- If location-aware audio holds up as a format, phone-led walks begin competing with human guides and printed guides for the same visitor spending, pushing tourism toward software-mediated experiences.
- The pattern reinforces a familiar Silicon Valley structure in which a high-profile firing becomes the setup for a founder's next venture, with reputation doing the early marketing work.
The trend: Travel is shifting from static guidebooks toward location-aware mobile experiences, and high-profile founders are using new products to reset their public narratives along the way.