😩 My worst hotel fail led to this app — real video on demand, but users are hard. Feedback?
After 10+ hours of travel, my wife and I arrived at a "luxury" hotel that looked nothing like the photos. Outdated furniture, endless construction noise — we wanted to leave immediately 😩.
In that moment I thought: "I'd happily pay $20 for a 30-second live video from someone there." That disappointment became the reason I started building Now & Here.
How it works (briefly):
Public mode (already live): Users share short videos from their current location on the map 🌍
Paid tasks (in development, USDT demo): Request custom video (e.g. "show me this hotel balcony right now") — nearby person films for reward, platform takes commission.
Android MVP is live in play market here.
Telegram community: t.me/now_a_here (channel - you can see demo video inside) / t.me/now_and_here_community (chat)
App looks like
A bit of technical side — why it's built seriously (not just a quick MVP): We approached this as a scalable foundation from day one:
Backend — clean microservices architecture in quarkus , jdk 21, GraalVM native compile base. I tried to implement every domain in it own microservice.
Message broker - Kafka
Database — PostgreSQL with PostGIS for precise geolocation queries
Payments — USDT integration via blockchain (planned for mainnet later). Why USDT ? Because I don't have enough reources today to implement faster other payment methods. USDT as temporary method looks simple to integrate and international.
Auth & Security — KeyCloak based decision + some of our services
Mobile — Android first, iOS ready to go when traction appears
Web - React (today it's not enough resources to support it, because we focused on android and more important tasks)
Besides, we configure our own infra like ad servers, jenkins, nexus and etc. It's really hard work and I tried to use my experience in right way.
This is not a throwaway prototype — we want something that can handle hundred of requests without breaking. 6 months mostly solo (with one dev partner) — but only ~10 users so far. It's my main problem - I am and my student experienced developers, but no so good in marketing.
Today we decided to find 50-100 users for our telegram channel. It help us to get feedback, to check our architecture and to make us more confident.
Reality check: User acquisition is the real killer.
What do you think?
Ever had a similar hotel/travel fail?
Would you use/request live video?
Tech feedback / roast welcome — what would you change in the stack?
Ideas on getting first real users?
Thanks for reading! 🚀
