Markdown Editing, a Media Library, and Branded Payment Buttons

Five days after launch, the second Digital Guidebooks release went out. Most of what shipped came directly from the first wave of operators using the product in real tours. The pattern was consistent: the bones of the guidebook worked, but the editing experience had rough edges that slowed down setup.

This release closes the biggest of those edges.

Markdown Formatting in Every Text Field

The single most common request from launch-week operators was the ability to format text. Bold the name of a dish at a food stop. Italicize a guide's parting note. Add a bulleted list of dietary options on a tasting page. Drop in a link to a partner's reservation form.

Every guest-facing text field in a Digital Guidebook now renders markdown. Operators write standard markdown syntax — asterisks for bold, underscores for italic, dashes for bullet points, brackets and parentheses for links — and the formatting appears on the guest page exactly as it was written. No preview round-trip, no rich-text toolbar to fight with, no copy-paste from Word that brings broken HTML along.

The trade-off is a slight learning curve for operators new to markdown. The trade-off in the other direction was unacceptable: either a stripped-down plain-text experience that read flat to guests, or a heavy rich-text editor that always produces messy output.

A Media Library With Storage Tracking

Operators upload a lot of images. Logos, hero photos, stop images, guide portraits, social photos, and the various versions of all of those as a guidebook evolves. The launch release made it easy to add images. It did not make it easy to see what was already there.

The new media library is a single view of every image in an operator's account. It shows storage usage against the plan limit, lets operators browse what is there, and supports deleting images that are no longer in use. The same library is the source for every image upload field in the app, so operators can pick from existing media instead of re-uploading a logo for the tenth time.

The most common operator reaction so far has been finding the version of their logo they actually wanted to use, three folders deep on their hard drive, sitting right at the top of the media library where they uploaded it weeks ago and forgot about.

Branded Payment and Review Buttons

The gratuity page launched with text buttons. Each button read the name of the payment platform — Venmo, Cash App, Zelle, PayPal — and led to the guide's personal payment link. It worked, but it lacked the visual cue guests use to confirm where a tap is sending them.

The payment buttons now wear the real brand colors. Venmo green. Cash App green. Zelle purple. PayPal blue. Apple Cash, Google Pay, and the rest each render in the color the platform is already known for. Guests recognize the destination at a glance and tap with confidence.

The review platform buttons got the same treatment. Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and other supported platforms each render in their own brand colors on the leave-a-review page. Operators consistently report that this is the kind of change that does not feel like a feature when it ships, but quietly increases conversion on the page where it lives.

Onboarding Tooltip Tour

New operators landing in the editor for the first time were bouncing more than they should have been. The product has 13 page types, a stops library, a guide profile editor, a gratuity setup, review platform selection, share controls, and a publish flow. None of that is hard once an operator knows where the controls are. Finding the controls without help was the friction.

The onboarding tour is an 8-step guided walkthrough that runs the first time an operator opens the guidebook editor. It highlights the page list, demonstrates page reordering, points at the stops and guide tools, walks through the gratuity setup, and ends at the publish button. Operators can skip it, restart it from the help menu, and the tour does not block any controls.

Smaller Wins in This Release

Other improvements that landed in v0.1.1:

• Maps fix. The launch version had a Google Maps rendering issue on the public guidebook stops page. Maps now load reliably on every stop with an address.
• Google Maps Places API migration. Address autocomplete in the stops editor moved from the deprecated legacy API to the new Places API, ahead of Google's sunset of the old endpoint.
• Referral tracking dashboard. Operators referring other operators now see invite status, signup conversion, and the capacity bonuses earned.
• Guide feedback widget. Guides submit feedback from their dashboard. Submissions are AI-summarized and visible to the platform team.
• Reservation system selector. Operators pick their existing booking system (FareHarbor, Peek, Rezdy, and others) during account setup, which informs how the AI importer reads pricing widgets later.
• Operator analytics, early version. Tip click stats, FAQ engagement, and share tracking with trend charts.
• API uptime monitoring. 15-minute health checks on Google Maps, Stripe, Supabase, and Netlify with alerts so production issues surface before operators do.
• Marketing site refresh. Payment platform logo bar on the home page, a new /faqs page with five categories, and the AI importer highlighted on the Create section.

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