What were your challenges with site creation?

I looked around at other sites doing the same sort of thing and decided that asking a few canned questions and spitting back a list of cities wasn't really a good approach. I had already done a lot of research and created a short list of potential cities for myself. Trying out these sites mostly failed to get me a list that made any sense to me. So I wasn't impressed with that approach.

I decided it would need to be a consultancy doing custom research. I don't really know how to make that happen and it seems like there may not be a market for that. Or, if there is, it wasn't a market a homeless woman was going to be able to sell to. No one was going to hire me to do that kind of research so I could improve my income and get off the street.

I've seen people post questions to various forums, similar to this Ask HN but more focused. And there's lots of free info on the internet already via sites like City Data and Best Places.

But when I asked around about how people make such decisions, part of the feedback I got was that deciding where to move was an alien concept. Only super rich people think like that. Most people live where they were born or go where the job takes them or similar. They don't pick some personal best place for their personal best life.

I was homeless at the time and trying to decide where to move to try to get back into housing. It never occurred to me that only very, very privileged people ever wondered where they might prefer to live. I was dirt poor. I didn't see myself as very, very privileged. But that's part of the feedback I got.

Free or very cheap info on the topic is very popular. You see a lot of articles with lists of "best cities to retire" or "best cities for young families." But it's very generic, really, and I'm not aware of any pricier custom solutions for the space.

I never figured out what the next steps might be. I asked a couple of people from HN for feedback. One replied and the other never answered me. I don't have experience doing something like that and I don't have good connections and couldn't get enough feedback to figure out where to go next with the idea.

I think I eventually took the website off the internet and stopped bothering.

It's potentially something someone else could maybe tweak and run with, someone who knows how to set up a consultalncy or has the right connections where they could get good feedback. That doesn't happen to be me.

Oh, also, if you google terms like "personal relocation," you mostly get moving companies, not services helping you decide where to move. The assumption is you already know where you are going and you need help making it happen. The idea that you would pick a dream location seems to not really exist, in spite of the popularity of questions like this one in forums and "best places" type books and articles.

If you talk to enough homeless people, you will definitely find some who chose where they live.

I talk to plenty of homeless people. I'm well aware they often choose where they live.

They are not the target market for a service I want to charge money for. So my awareness of that is not really relevant to my feeling that this would not fly, at least at the time and under the circumstances that I was doing the initial research.