How 20+ Years of Traveling with Friends, and a Lot of Group Chats, Led to Slyce

I have a group of close friends I've known for the better part of 40+ years, some since kindergarten, a few more picked up along the way through high school. At its core it's a solid, tight-knit crew, the kind you feel genuinely lucky to have.

After graduation, we all went our separate ways. Email was still pretty new back then, but we embraced it and stayed in touch. We'd reunite during school breaks, and a few of the guys had access to family lake homes, so extended weekends became our thing whenever the timing worked out. The bar for coordination was low. Someone would fire off an email saying "hey, lake house next weekend, whoever can make it, great!" And whoever could make it, made it. Expenses got split with a quick breakdown of who owed what, or we just played credit card roulette and sorted it out later.

The Problem with Group Travel Planning

Then life happened.

Jobs, relationships, kids, the whole thing. Getting everyone's schedules to align over email became a real challenge, and the trips started happening less and less. So sometime in the early 2000s, we made a vow: an annual Guys Weekend, no excuses, make it work. Every year, no matter what (COVID years excluded, and we don't talk about those). And we've kept that vow ever since.

But organizing eight grown adults, even for something everyone actually wanted to do, turned out to be its own adventure. Email threads got buried. Group chats were an improvement, but they'd spiral into hundreds of messages with no clear answer in sight. Someone would miss the key reply, the thread would move on, and suddenly half the group was out of the loop.

The Frankenstein Solution: Spreadsheets and Multiple Apps

Then one of the guys had a genuinely brilliant idea: use a Doodle poll to figure out possible dates. It sounds simple, but it was a revelation. Suddenly we could see availability at a glance, pick a date that worked for most people, and actually get it on the calendar. Game changer.

As the years went on, we started branching out from the lake houses to full-blown destination trips, which meant we were now also figuring out where to stay (usually a short-term rental), how to get there, and what to do. The planning got more complex, and so did the expenses. We leaned on spreadsheets for a while, and while they worked, they were a pain to maintain and even more of a pain to settle out at the end.

That changed when someone stumbled across Splitwise. Suddenly the spreadsheet headache was gone. Just log expenses as you go and let it figure out who owes who at the end. Between Doodle polls and Splitwise, we'd cobbled together a system that mostly worked.

But "mostly worked" started feeling like a cop-out.

A good example is our trip to Boulder, Colorado. One guy took the lead on sorting through rentals on VRBO and Airbnb and securing the house. Another handled the car rental. Someone else tracked down an ATV outfit up in Estes Park and got us booked. We all tried to time our flights into Denver close enough that nobody was waiting around too long. It came together, but it took a small army of group chat threads, shared links, and a lot of "did you see my message?" to pull it off. And somewhere in all of that, nobody could remember who was bringing the bluetooth speaker.

We were still bouncing between multiple tools, copying information from one place to another, and losing context along the way. I'm a designer by trade, and the friction in our process started to bother me the way that friction always bothers designers: quietly at first, and then all at once.

Why I Built Slyce: The All-In-One Group Trip Planner

So I took it upon myself to build something better. Something that could take a group from "hey, when can everyone go?" all the way to "here's who pays who" in a single, seamless flow. Date polling, destination voting, accommodation planning, expense tracking, and settlement, all under one roof, all in one simple experience. I threw in a supplies and task list too, modeled after SignupGenius, so everyone knows who's bringing what and what still needs to get done.

What Slyce Isn't (And Why That Matters)

And here's the thing: when I built Slyce, I made a deliberate choice not to solve all of that. Slyce is not going to out-muscle Expedia or Airbnb at their own game, and I am not trying to. What Slyce does is fill in the gaps. The democratic decisions, the group coordination, the money, and the who-owes-who at the end. The reservations live where they always have. Slyce just makes everything around them a whole lot easier.

Not Just for Destination Trips

And here is something else I realized along the way: you don't actually need to be packing a suitcase to use it. If you are organizing a local event, a big night on the town, or an office party (that the company definitely isn't footing the bill for), Slyce is for you too. The same headaches of polling dates, coordinating who is bringing what, and splitting the check apply whether you are traveling across the country or just heading across town.

It started as a solution for childhood friends trying to plan a weekend trip. My hope is that it becomes the go-to for every group trying to do the same, wherever they are heading.

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