I made this prototype in a month.
Tailwind CSS + Php 1 index.php + Mysql 1 table.
Crawlers/Scrapers for extracting events have been something interesting for me last years. I spent so much time working on tech to extract them, machine learning, crawlers, scrapers, etc.... Poor results or too much results ... other story.
September I rethinked everything, human+automatic sources, and I got this.
airovic.com Availabe in USA: San francisco, Los Angeles, NYC and Miami. And EUROPE: Berlin, London, Madrd, Barcelona.
I'm fucking happy. I just made and completed my proposal for a crowdsourced agenda of things to do. MVP done. In some ways I'm free. (Spend 5 years with other prototypes, I even added bayesian, spotify api, flights and airbnbs ...) I'm happy with this last version, based on an excel of 400 urls, ~40 urls per city recommended by locals.
Btw, Events are not fake!! all real. 5 people working on this curating events, + 78 custom scrapers have got 30k legitimate events. airovic.com/stats.php you see databases.
I would appreciate any feedback.
Re: your question of whether to pursue the project, my thoughts from the perspective of someone who works in the tourism & travel industry.
Collecting and aggregating event listings is, as you note, time consuming. It can't all be done by crawl/scrape. Curation is an important factor here, and so perhaps you tailor the product to the perceived needs of a specific type of end user.
First user type that comes to mind: those of us who maintained Facebook accounts for the event listings/invites, but have all but fallen off of Facebook over the years due to... everything else that's wrong with the product :)
I'll say this, too — Airovic is entering a space where your number one competition is Google. Google orients its event listings geographically, around a "place," and I think your opportunity is to orient around people and their preferences.
To that end, another competitor here is Spotify for concerts — much as I hate to admit this, as a retired "Cool Person," I'm generally made aware of bands I want to see touring in my area first by Spotify, and then by social and local media.
That said, in identifying and meeting the needs of a narrower band of users, you may find that emphasizing curation and personalization could position your product as a more useful method of discovery.
I agree with you, narrowed down will make everything sharper.
But I don't know, I need something like this, all-in-one-events, probably the issue are categories and curated information. First month has been very time consuming, but it's something we can go refinating.
I think events make it much easier to sell flights, hotels or other events tickets...
What do you think about the events categories? do you miss anything?
Kids probably is a good niche, the most difficult to get right.
I clicked around a little... I notice that Los Angeles, when you choose Meetups, displays events in other places like Norwalk or SF.
I need to do some cleanup. Meetups are easy to get, but very low quality and uncategorized.
What do you think about the events categories? do you miss anything? Which ones of them you care about? Would you add any?
It had a bunch of stuff like artist popularity, because there were too many concerts in places like NYC to just give people a huge list to go through.
I think it's a great project to cut your teeth on. Lots of opportunity to learn in areas that you want to get better at.
I don't think it's a good business opportunity, but I'm happy to be proven wrong. This is an area that I get pitched on a lot (I'm not an investor, but try to help start-ups where I can), and even when I started HearWhere, SongKick started at the same time, raised $60m and didn't make a dent in the market.
I have no idea why you called it airovic. I don't know how that gets associated with the final product.
I already did complications version of this concept in the past, this time was like the final, Flash mode, do it, try it hard one more and time.
Technically, I felt in love with this project. Natural language processing + scraping + data mining and maintenance ... So, this time was from other angle, 1 index.php + 1 mysql events, and focus on getting data right, quickly, 1 monoth.
Songkick is giving me popularity, the only thing I add is event views (each visitor of an event +1). But I already added bayesians, apis, and shit that made me never ship. This time I want to focus really on user experience and quality data. Be patience and work a lot on SEO.
Grow it and sell it is the plan. The monthly costs are easy to absorb, and I'm the first I need something like this.
Airovic means tourist info in Papua.
Agree the monthly cost is low, I was spending maybe $70/month back in the day (linode servers), I'm sure it's even less now.
Looking a bit closer. Your homepage is nice, but you're probably going to need something more engaging on your results pages to get people clicking. It's a lot of text right now.
Check out City of Syndey's What's On site for some inspiration https://whatson.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/?time=weekend
Grow & Sell is the plan hey?? Have you seen any other start-ups that have done this that have been acquired? If you're looking at SongKick, they aren't a good example. Raised spent $60M to get purchased for < $10M from what I understand. So the creators probably got nothing.
It's a great evergreen starter project, but probably not a sustainable business. A year or two later I watched an episode of Calacanis' TWIST where he gave feedback to another group attempting it and I think he articulated the main problem well. Something along the lines of "the beach is crowded, the water dirty…" In short, it's a never ending job, with lots of competitors and little return. Have to compete as well with places like reddit/facebook where the hard work is outsourced. Hard to get a community built just on that when most people don't look for things to do constantly.
That said if done right it would be valuable, maybe if publicly subsidized somehow.
(My old domain kpasa is probably available on the cheap, I liked the name. Don't know what airovic is or means. :-)
Airovic is a team of humans+robots that will do the work for you going to all these sites (+40 per city recommended by locals), and gathering all information to show it together.
I would like to show publicly the sources used, but I'm afraid website owners won't like it, even if I send them traffic for free..
I cross fingers so airovic.com is the first place you check when you go to bathroom , working now on infinite scrolling :D
