About airovic.com, Things to do near you

3rd October, 2021 | By @betoayesa

The goal of Airovic is to be a crowsourced global agenda, a database of OFFLINE events. Concerts and live music, things to do with kids, Art exhibitions, Sport events, Meetups and events, Street markets, local activities and free stuff to do, like no other.

🚀 Story behind Airovic

Finally I did it, it's been in total like 5 years of thinking about a "google for events". My first website was a site about techno music listings. natzar.co, I would tell you this is version number 4, but my friends would tell you that this is version 99999999e^32. This is my "proposal" to always know cool things to do near you. This is the project there will be no more "versions", just new data sources.

I started in websites back in 1999 just with this a site to show all listings from all clubs. Abandoned that when I was tired of night clubbing.
I got back to it, planning to mix Things to do + flights + hotel.
Don't try it at home, I lost total contact with traditional UI/UX, have you tried to make an UI for a matrix like that? Seriously after that no other UI made sense, should user start with departure date, from the city, with the artist they like? Very confusing, months of just hallucination, no execution. There was execution, I made thousands of small things, and then iterate over them until one day I removed everything.... it was a looop.
As I see the new airovic UI, I see myselve recovered, not joking, not any UI had any sense, should we focus and things to do, then flights and hotel, or the important thing is when the user is ready to travel? That was a loop that endured for too long.

🔬¿How it works?

A combination of automatic & manual processes are used to get data from multiple venues, sites and google calendars. Tailwind has been used for the construction of the site. Php / Mysql for the back. A cronjob keeps stored data up to date.

🌟 Please try airovic, and let me know your thoughts! 🤜🤛 @betoayesa

🚴 Why you need to build Airovic?

• Under served need of knowing about anything happening near you or in a specific place
• I always miss cultural things, concerts for not staying up to date.
• There is something in events that always atracted me: title+address+date+time. Love the technical challenge.
• I'm totally sure, if not airovic, there will be a way to know quickly whats happening around you.
• I did too many scraping projects in the past

🔬Challenges

• Quality over quantity, but can't miss a single one
• Get complete data (Prices are not easy some times)
• It's imposible to extract addresses automatically, too many ways of writing an address (globally)
• Keep myself away from trying to add flights, tickets, airbnb and hotels. Just link to them
• Keywords are very popular, but there are tons of oudated "things to do" sites

🔬Building in public with best practices

✔︎ 1 index.php file only. Simplify your life, then keep looking for things.
✔︎ English / USD / USA.
✔︎ Target: US cities with TECH workers
✔︎ Mobile First. Tailwind works great.
✔︎ 8h spent on the MVP. (After making for than 5 complete redesigns of the site, this time was clear).
✔ urls for SEO. Pretty cool how they look.

Align everything to serve 100% first users. These first users should be part of a very big group of potential users. Focus on USA to start.

🌟 Please try airovic, and let me know your thoughts! 🤜🤛 @betoayesa

👌 Monetization

If everything goes well, promoted events and sticky Happy hours ads on the sidebar will start appearing.

Roadmap

• ✔︎ MVP
• Finish data mining for october
• Launch to get feedback
• Launch on Product Hunt to get feedback
• Talk to real users over social networks to get feedback
• Review all feedback, apply changes
• Add more cities, EUROPE.

🚴 I love feedback

🌟 Please try airovic, and let me know your thoughts! 🤜🤛 @betoayesa

Author

Hi! I'm Beto, and I'm and events junkie @betoayesa