Localmore

Local information is spaghetti. Finding something in your local area requires visiting various different platforms or having to click through multiple Google search results. The information is tangled up and difficult to navigate quickly.

Most companies target the globe. But there is a drawback. The details get lost. There is only so much information you can gather by trying to describe thousands of different places simultaneously.

Niche platforms have their advantages, but they usually come at a cost of distraction and uncertainty for someone trying to navigate their daily, urban life.

A single point of contact. By reducing the steps required to navigate urban living, the resulting clarity gives rise to endless possibilities. Implementing such possibilities is difficult for companies providing services worldwide.

There are unique advantages to being hyper-focused.

In order to attract users, we need content. So how about we start with content that is unlikely to be changed, and that will not be uploaded by the users anyways?

We start with very simple, static things, such as playgrounds, sports fields and chill spots. While this may not sound that exciting, the initial 300 items would serve as a starting point.

From there, we could strategically expand to other areas, building on top of the already existing content.

As soon as we collect enough content for the average user to explore, the average user count will start growing.

As the user count grows, so do our opportunities to create new features for the connection aspect.

The main feature of the app will be the tag-functionality.

Each tag on Localmore will be pre-defined. The drawback is that users won't be able to create their own tags, and that creating tags manually will take a long time. The upside, however, is an awesome filtering system.

Each item/profile points to at least one category. Each category points to at least one tag-group.

An item can only contain tags under the tag-groups provided by its categories.

Using aggregation, we can filter through the content using categories, tags, tag-groups.

An example would be looking for a restaurant that is: 1. In the sushi category, 2. With tag 'Credit card payment' under tag-group 'Payment type', 3. With tag 'Playground' under tag-group 'Nearby'.

1. The thousands of tags will make it fun to combine random tags and find the best matching results.

2. By simply switching the category and tags with a single click, users will save dozens of clicks when searching for something locally.

3. Each pre-defined tag can be applied to any type of profile. Meaning, if you go to the homepage and select the tag 'Volleyball', you'll get results for people with 'Volleyball' selected as their hobby, volleyball sports clubs, volleyball competitions/events, places with a volleyball court nearby etc.

This project is the sole reason I learned to write software. I went for a no-sql database because of the frequent database adjustments, and Next.js vercel because it's very simple to deploy.

What also surprised me was the difficulty of building a proper admin managing tool for a more complex website, which I have done using retool.

I have taken around 10.000 images over 3 years for the app. This project was my opportunity to learn more about photography, and the difficulty of managing/implementing content consistently across the entire website.

Localmore is far from finished. The initial version isn’t even released yet. Although I could technically learn and build everything myself, I am starting to realize that partnering up with a developer would be the smartest way forward.

If you're a developer and would like to work on a big, long-term project, reach out to me at domassirbike@gmail.com.