He's also big in the local Chamber of Commerce and said that lots of Chambers are willing to spend money to position their town as outdoor-friendly.
I'm not trolling here, just in case I've missed a really obvious one
The closest thing I found to something like that was Simbi (https://simbi.com) but I hesitated to make an actual step forward as I never heard or read of anyone going down that route and wasn't sure if that was the "right way" to do it.
One thing that doesn't seem quite right though.
Shouldn't location, not activity, be the first bit of information requested from the user?
Yeah, that was the idea -- provide a high quality database of outdoors activities to the end users and then charge the providers / venues a fee for some extended information etc. But in order to even approach the providers / venues I had to have some kind of traction from the end users, which I failed to achieve.
>One thing that doesn't seem quite right though. >Shouldn't location, not activity, be the first bit of information requested from the user?
At the beginning I wasn't sure how to pull off the location filter nicely (should I use HTML5 geolocation, Gmaps geolocation, simple dropdown etc.) and just went without it but I have received this same piece of feedback more than once so I might go and add that, just for kicks.
That and an easy way to add your favorite venue near you (since it looks like there is only one venue in the US outside of CA).
Visually and concept wise it looks interesting. I bet there are outdoor adventure meetups in most cities that would be interested.
I think there are multiple reasons why it wasn't successful as I believed it might be, most importantly because I built something without first researching the market enough, and failure to do so got me building something which wasn't very helpful to people.
Another important issue was marketing. I'm developer myself, and even though I tried my best to get the word out there, the results weren't as good as I imagined they would be, on one side because I had no idea what I was doing, and on the other, because I didn't spend enough money on higher quality marketing.
I spent couple of months building it but I don't regret that time -- although this conclusion is probably specific to my personal situation at the time, where I had just closed the shop on my own development agency of 3+ years and wanted to get a break by working on something fun. Additionally, out of all the "weekend projects" I started over the years, this was the first one I actually "finished", and that means something to me, regardless of the outcome.
If I get into something similiar in the near future, I would definitely pay much more attention to the aspect of getting the feedback to build something people actually want to use. And marketing, definitely marketing.