Bobby Ho is a currency converter and market price guide for Vietnam and Bali. It helps tourists figure out what things actually cost - before they pay for them.
But the question people actually ask is a different one. Not what is Bobby Ho, but who.
Fair question. Here's the honest answer.
It started in a queue in Vietnam
Six months ago I took my family to Vietnam for the first time. Two weeks. Absolutely loved it. But the first few days were intense - new country, new food, new everything, and a currency I couldn't wrap my head around.
The Vietnamese dong has a lot of zeros. A lot. You're routinely dealing with numbers in the hundreds of thousands, and your brain - or at least my brain - just doesn't naturally convert that on the fly. Standing in a queue outside a shop, or being quoted a price by a street vendor, I'd be fumbling around with my phone trying to do the maths while also holding a coffee or a water bottle. It wasn't working.
I started thinking: there has to be a better way to do this. Something quick, one-handed, minimal typing.
That was the first idea. An easy currency converter for people in exactly that situation. With quick buttons and a slider because most of the time I just needed to work out 'is this a dollar or 10 dollars'.
Then there was the t-shirt problem
The currency converter idea was straightforward enough. But what happened next was what really shaped Bobby Ho into what it is.
We were in a shop looking at t-shirts. No prices on anything. My wife told me I'd have to ask the price - and then negotiate.
I don't know why, but that's genuinely one of my biggest fears when shopping in Asia. I know a few words of the local language, max. I have no idea what the going rate is for a t-shirt, or where to even start with a haggle. I don't want to insult someone by offering too little, but I also don't want to be the tourist who pays five times what something is worth just because I was too awkward to push back.
So I stood there, frozen, in front of a rack of t-shirts. And then walked out with nothing.
That's when I realised the currency converter wasn't enough. What I actually needed was a starting point. What does this stuff normally cost? What's a fair price? What's a good opening offer, and where should I land?
I didn't need the best possible price. I needed to not feel like an idiot standing in a market or too overwhelmed to even go in.
That's when the price guidance idea came in - pairing the currency converter with real-world market prices for the kinds of things tourists actually buy.
The bit that surprised me
After a few beers on the balcony one evening, watching the street below, I had a realisation that changed the whole direction of the app.
I didn't want Bobby Ho to be a tool for getting the cheapest possible price. That's not what I was after.
The people I'd been buying from - the vendors at the markets, the stall holders, the street food sellers - they were warm, friendly, always smiling. And I knew that what they earned compared to people back home was next to nothing. Getting them down to the absolute floor on every transaction didn't feel like a win to me. It felt a bit grim, honestly.
So Bobby Ho isn't about the cheapest price. It's about a fair price. A price that's good for the buyer and good for the seller. That ended up becoming the whole point of it - and the tagline: fair deals for everyone.
Testing it at Ben Thanh market
Because I'm the kind of person who normally goes out of their way to avoid haggling, I figured I should actually test whether this thing worked in the wild with me as my own target market. So before I went in, I spent half an hour googling prices, making notes on what to open with and where to land.
I walked into Ben Thanh market with a mission: buy my kid a red baseball cap with a very plausible Ferrari logo on it.
It worked. I knew what to expect, I didn't feel like I was ripping anyone off, and nobody ripped me off either. I got the hat.
But that's the thing. Half an hour of research before every market purchase isn't a solution. It's just a different kind of problem. Bobby Ho is that half hour of work, already done for you.
Where Bobby Ho is now
Bobby Ho currently covers Vietnam and Bali - two of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, and two places where the currency conversion problem and the market pricing problem hit at the same time.
The prices come from on-the-ground research in the key markets in Hanoi, Hoi An, and Ho Chi Minh City, plus a huge amount of research into traveller communities online - people posting, sharing, and blogging about what they bought and what they paid. We're also building in live price updates from users who choose to share their experiences - what they bought, where, when, the opening price, and where they landed. That community feedback loop is what keeps the data honest.
Thailand and other destinations are on the roadmap. The core idea scales anywhere there's a tourist market, a language barrier, and a currency with more zeros than you're used to.
So who is Bobby Ho?
Bobby Ho isn't a person. It's just a name - the kind of name that sounds like someone who'd know all the local market prices and slip you the inside information before you went in.
Which is pretty much what the app does.