About
From Mandalay to Athens
I'm Stefanos Parussis. I'm half German, half Greek, and Parroo started on two trips I haven't been able to shake.
Two trips that planted the seed
In Mandalay, Myanmar, my friends and I checked into a small hotel run by two sisters. They wanted to walk us around their neighborhood but didn't have the time. Instead, they handed us a photocopy of a hand-drawn map and sent a simple MP3 over WhatsApp. We started and stopped the audio ourselves as we walked. It wasn't polished. It was just them telling us what it was like to grow up there. Tiny details, memories, the places that actually mattered to them.
It became one of the best tours I've ever had. Raw, personal, real.
Years later, traveling with friends in Athens, we kept stopping in front of incredible places asking the same question — "what is this, and why does it matter?" Google led to long Wikipedia pages. Chatbots needed the right prompt and didn't know where we were standing. I wanted something built for being on the street: fast when you want it, deeper when you have time, audio when you'd rather look up than down.
That's when I started building Parroo.
How places get into Parroo
Each place goes through structured research, source documentation, article writing, verification, and a separate audio rewrite — a 3-minute script written for listening, not the article fed through text-to-speech. AI is used inside the production stack, not as a one-prompt shortcut.
Why "Parroo"?
The name comes from Stuttgart Bad Cannstatt, where a small flock of wild parrots has become a local legend. I loved the idea that every city has stories like that — unexpected, local, worth noticing. Parrots are curious and talkative. That's the spirit I wanted Parroo to have, and why the logo is a parrot. It's also a nod to "peruse" — picking up a story whenever something catches your eye.
A solo project — please write back
Parroo is built by one person with a stack of no-code tools and a lot of persistence. I'd rather ship something real than wait for perfection, so the app keeps getting better as I add cities and refine the research. If you spot something wrong or have an idea, please write to info@parroo.app.