Tell HN: I mixed Yelp with Craigslist and got this. | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: I mixed Yelp with Craigslist and got this.

iowacityaccess.com

32 pointsproexploit44 comments

I love love love your design (so much I've bookmarked it as a reference for my own projects).

It's the perfect mix between extreme minimalist and professional.

Thank you so much. Minimalism is my guiding principle in designing things. For this website, I took it even more to the extreme than usual, to focus on the ease of use and helping users find the content, but this is literally one of the best compliments you could give me. :)

I agree, its very neat, clean and easy to use. Its so straight forward its amazing!

It's a pretty good start but I would suggest doing the same as for new events with the bars and restaurants. When I clicked on the "are we missing" link, I expected a form where I could add one (either automatically or moderator-approved) but instead got a popup window with a single text field.

If I could easily locations I would (well, actually I wouldn't because I know nothing about Iowa but if it were available in my location I would) but I'm not going to start writing prose to get a location added, especially not on a mobile device which is where sites like these are most useful.

EDIT: Another suggestion would be to rename the Events header to be more in line with the verb theme leading up to it. Drink - Eat - Play for example or something similar to that. Breaking the theme is jarring.

Thank you for your suggestions. I always like hearing about other user's experience with the website.

The reason I have the are we missing link? instead of a complete form is because of the large amount of information I collect on each bar/restaurant. I wouldn't expect a user to give me enough information, and I wanted to allow them the flexibility to say something like: "the summary seems like it was written by a two year old" rather than a form they need to say.

@EDIT: Funny you would say this! Originally, the design did say eat - drink - play (there's even a banner still saying that on my Facebook group). I felt that play didn't describe general events well enough but I may have to reconsider.

Thank you for taking the time to share your comments with me.

You can generate some nice cashflow working on niche local sites like this.

General process:

1. Scrape listings off yellowpages/yelp

2. Start ranking for local keywords

3. Call restaurants/bars/auto dealerships to confirm info and generate lead

4. Offer ad sales on site, as well as design/SEO -- can outsource the latter

There's a great discussion on wickedfire with respect to this field, if you can tolerate the profanity: http://bit.ly/4L1Rya

I like this. I live in Iowa City and have been thinking for a while now that Iowa City is sorely lacking a good place for entertainment info. Goiowacity is widely used even though it's terrible. If you're looking to collaborate on this or other projects my e-mail's in my profile.

Sent you an email. Glad to know there's others in the area!

If you need more local content, you can try pulling some data from Oodle (http://developer.oodle.com/oodle-api). I know for a fact that CL is very guarded about scraping their content.

I think my title may have been a little misleading. I don't scrape the data from Yelp and Craigslist, I meerly used them as my inspiration. All of the content is added manually by myself (hence the empty parts of the site).

Would be great if people could go on and add their own businesses. There is only so much you can by yourself.

The biggest issue I've been dealing with, and one of the main causes for creating this site, is inaccuracy of information available. There's dozens of Iowa City bar or restaurant sites, but none of them have good data, and none display it well. I do have a portal (iowacityaccess.com/portal - you won't be able to use it, but can see it) that allows business owners to let me know about changes and additions while verifying with their personal 8 digit code that I've mailed to them. It's optional, but it may help me cut down on some of the work in the future.

I'm doing something similar with http://www.desertdrinks.com, and I like your site. However, unless the dollars start flowing in rather quickly, you're going to find it difficult to keep the data current. Once you appear in Google for some local terms (perhaps some specific bar/restaurant names), business owners will seek you out. Are you prepared to monetize that?

Your "advertise" page suggests you're not serious about monetizing this site, which means it's likely to be dead before summer.

Regardless, I wish you the best and I'll bookmark it so I can watch it develop.

First off, love your site. Great stuff.

I have a small monetization feature built in (homepage featured and search results featured). I really want to stay away from Adsense and other "annoying ad" type income generating. I am offering web design service to all the locations in my "welcome packet" in an attempt to generate some recurring income (offering sites for $99/month. Minimum 1 year contract).

May I ask what you do in terms of advertising / featured listings etc? If you don't want to share the details, I'd be happy to have you email me as well.

I acknowledge that monetization has been one of the overlooked parts of the website, as I wanted to create a resource first, make money second. Your post gives me second thoughts about that.

Desert Drinks is a side project for me -- an experiment in the potential of a focused local directory. Right now, I have a single sponsor (the tall banner on the right).

I plan to more aggressively market and monetize the site this year (I just left my day job last month, and I have a to-do list a mile long). Even in the best-case scenario, I think it would be very tough to make a living on Desert Drinks alone. I can see it generating ~$1000/mo in this market of about 400,000 people.

I think the key is to figure out the formula and then build nationally market-by-market. In my opinion, that's how I think an individual could bootstrap this sort of business.

I am on the opposite end of your design, feeling like its hard to navigate or figure out, because all the filters are displayed in several different content boxes in the same column, and each column representing a different option.

The beautiful thing about craigslist is that there are few options and when they do give you options they bundle it in a nice little box at the top. Yelp is beautiful because of the filters and ability to drill down to areas quickly.

Overall not something I would use as I feel yelp does a good job of this already, but overall good job.

I appreciate your comment. However, I am having a little trouble understanding it. I personally find my design easier to navigate than Craigslist and less crowded. I understand this isn't the case for you, and I would really like to hear more detail about this.

As far as filtering, you're absolutely right. I wanted to include a sort of advanced search that constantly narrowed down the options using AJAX as you selected things, but it proved too difficult to implement and I settled for second-best.

Without much content I'm not sure how it's going to work. And you plan on manually adding in all of the content? Is that really feasible? Are you updating the movies everyday by hand?

Voting should be ajaxified.

I know you are trying to be the informal, formative resource, but, for me at least, it is a major turn off when I detect someones bias in what is supposed to be just that, a resource. It's obvious we have different tastes, why would I return to your site?

I did a soft launch with only the downtown bars enabled as that's going to be huge to the students in the area. It was a minor goal that I was able to set that leaves the site up and "functional".

The movies are not updated by hand, but added via an API. Everything else, shouldn't change often, so once I get it in, it should be manageable. I guess I'll find that out with time. I'm more concerned with having accurate content rather than taking time to update the content.

I agree that voting should use AJAX and will implement that in the future.

When you discuss the bias, are you referring to the summaries of the currently added bars? I don't intended to be biased (but it's very hard to control I imagine), so I'd love if you could give me an example or more details. The summaries were unfortunately not written by me, but a couple writers I hired in the area. I'm one of the worst writers I know, and I couldn't handle that aspect.

Fantastic stuff. A usability suggestion would be to change the color of links that lead to empty "no results" pages. You could of course "unhook" the links, but that would make it harder for people to navigate there to "add" an item, which is the way some people visualize the right way to do it. Good luck with it!

Very good idea. Right now some links to lead to no results pages, but only because I have such a wealth of information to add. In the future, any link available will have at least one result.

I launched it yesterday because I'm finally happy with the functionality, and I have most of the downtown bars listings complete. Iowa City is a college town, and I think a huge draw will be the Today's Specials listing of where U of I students can get drunk and lose the morals at the lowest possible price.

that is pretty neat. any plans to open source it, make it more generic or open up separate sites for other cities?

is it using APIs for CL/yelp or is it a custom job separate from the two and the description is just a comparison of functionality? i'd love to run it for mine and see how it looks.

This started as a project for just my city, as there's a ton of work that goes into information collection. I also want to be more involved in the area, have giveaways events etc, so something bigger would be too much for me to manage and I think, dilute the overall project.

As for open source or API, I've had some thoughts of selling the source to some other areas, but I don't want it to be so diluted that a dozen different hobbyists can attempt to mash together something for their own city using the script. Is that just me being selfish? I'd love to hear more.

It isn't using an API, the data is collected by me, and added manually. I've developed a pretty good admin panel behind the scenes with some other great features.

I think its important to note, that I'm not the main developer on this project. It has been my project for a long time, I've done all of the design, concepts, etc. But I've worked with a very skilled coder to implement everything.

Trying to sublicense it non-competitively to only one hobbyist in each area is a really awful idea. FreeCycle turned into a massive clusterfuck because of this.

If you want your implementation to spread to other cities either make a franchise business out of it or make it open source.

I'm afraid of open source just turning it into a project that consumes my time and money with no return. I'd definitely be interested in "franchising" it so to speak so that other areas could use my work in their specific non-competing area and hopefully get a little bit of my development costs back. Anyone who has experience with this, I'd be happy to hear from you (email is in my profile).

I'm a sharing guy, really! I just don't want to jeopardize the project I've been working so hard on.

Thanks for your comment.

then i would suggest this -- develop more automation into the process, and make it something that can simply be piloted by an admin, and then hire/solicit admin to come and pilot the their city's site. set it up so that they can somehow get a cut of the revenue. for example, allow them to add in their adsense code and the site will display their ads 80% of the time.

you keep control over source, you keep some revenue, and it gets franchised out with locals at the helm of the individual sites.

More automation as in API from Yelp, etc?

I agree with the rest of what you're saying, but to me, the data gathering (while time consuming) is part of what makes my site better than others in my area. The information is confirmed, it's accurate.

Thanks for taking the time to comment.

in my head i was thinking of a process that puts things in an authorization queue. pull in all data that is probably accurate, and have an admin either hand-verify it or hand-edit it so that its right.

I developed something pretty similar to this. Check it out at http://barsannapolis.com/.

I like your website. It gives me some solid ideas for some things to add in the future hopefully. I'm so full of ideas that I can only do so many of them :)

Are you developing the software yourself, or working with someone else? It's very clean.

I'm working with a Ruby on Rails coder, but I am the sole owner, brain, designer, etc.

You should add a twitterbot too and get specials from local businesses that use Twitter.

you should get the bars to pay you to increase their rating :P

Haha. Ratings will be authentic unless some obvious tampering happens or something. I do have "sponsored" functionality built in for the future. I.e. for a fee, any bar can appear first in the search results that they appear in.

what if multiple bars pay the fee

For the homepage, rotation through all the featured listings. On the search pages, rotation in position.

nice - open source it.

In reply to your email as well, I'm unsure of my future plans for sharing the code. I do appreciate open source software, and it may be something I do, but I've spent thousands of dollars of my own money developing this. I'm 22. It's a big deal to me. I don't want to create another Yelp.com, I think that user-edited information can be too inaccurate.

I wouldn't want someone to be able to download my source, and start 3 more sites in my area as direct competitors. If I have a solid competitor, I'd like to know that they spent their time and money on it as well. As I stated above, I'm not 100% against open source, and would be happy to hear arguments for it.

My apologies. From the title and the minimalist design it appears I didn't consider the financial resources that went into the project. Quite honestly - I can only hope that tools such as this knock Yelp and other out of their place. I wish you good luck. Thanks for the down votes everyone.

An empty, undeveloped website? Why should we care?

Snark is a terrible way to comment. You could offer him constructive advice, not upvote him, or even flag the post if you choose. There are many less damaging and less mean ways to express your displeasure.

See the section on comments in PG's essay here: http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

The same could be said for any startup, site, or business that's just getting started. We should care because that's part of the reason the HN community exists.

That's a pretty valid point. There hasn't been a lot added, and likely you don't live near Iowa City. I shared it to show what I was doing and highlight the difference I've made that I think make it fundamentally better than Yelp for example. It's meant as inspiration and just to share with the community that I read every day, but haven't commented to yet.

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