Comment by natzar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by natzar | Hacker News Reader

Hi,

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.

Really cool that you built this from scratch for so many major cities! I am located in Chicago but browsed SF and the list returned there looked like a logical categorization of events & things to do.

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.

Thanks for your comment!

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.

Congrats! It's amazing to finish an MVP. What event will you be going to now that you surfaced it in your app?

I clicked around a little... I notice that Los Angeles, when you choose Meetups, displays events in other places like Norwalk or SF.

Meetups eventbrites work with radius, I got them wrong... removing ... thanks

Thanks! World Press Photo BCN is a good one. I missed Kings of Convenience concerts (2!! this f**ng month!) If you don't know them I'll recommend.

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?

Thanks for the rec. Their music has a pretty laid back vibe.

I think the categories overall capture a lot of categories. It would be nice to see parks and what you can do in them (i.e. basketball court, kids play structure, hiking trails, etc) but I have no idea how easy that information is to surface :)

A couple suggestions I would make are:

- combine reoccurring events. For example: https://www.airovic.com/los-angeles/street-markets-in-los-an... shows each of the farmers markets over and over. It drowns out the fact that there are multiple farmers markets in the same weekend. Maybe a quick fix would be to sort by date?

- have a concept of "distance from me". It doesn't have to be a map, but at least being able to say "within X miles of 'bleh' " would make things easier to see what is nearby.

- have a link to the information source. For example, if I want to see more details about a festival or concert, I don't see how to do so currently. If you start with it now you can work out over time how to transparently change the links to referral links and get some $$ like you are doing with the stay options.

Add Bangkok!

Soon! What websites are you using now?

What do you think about the events categories? do you miss anything? Which ones of them you care about? Would you add any?

Happy hour category is coming... Theater is the other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com