I listened to your feedback!

Hello peeps!

I recently made a post here, asking for feedback on my first ever product I am building called Walkway. You can find the thread here: indiehackers(dot)com/post/looking-for-feedback-on-my-first-ever-product-50b8352172

In that thread I received many good feedback which I thought about a lot and decided to implement a couple of suggestions or ideas I got from you guys, mixed with my own vision and feel.

To those who are not familiar with Walkway yet, Walkway is a service that lets you to find places. It used to be only able find places nearby, but now you can even find places around the world! So here are the changes I made according to feedback received:

• Sharing your current location is no longer mandatory. I built a new cloud function that fetches initial results according to client IP, with "geoip-lite" -package (npmjs(dot)com/package/geoip-lite). This is not a very accurate way to find places around you, but at least you get the initial results when you open the app. I added this functionality, since there was some feedback about not wanting to share the location with the app.

• You can find places around almost any city in the world! Again, I built a new cloud function that uses "all-the-cities" -package (npmjs(dot)com/package/all-the-cities) to find matching cities in the world, according to user input. This made things a little bit complicated on how to handle changes in the UI on whether to use the location of the city or the location of the user if both have been added, but will work on that a little more later.

• Added all the categories (types) which are supported by Google Places API (developers(dot)google(dot)com/places/supported_types) as selectable items when searching for places.

• Made some changes to the initial pricing model, as there were no paying customers yet. This is something people seem to like to comment a lot on, and is something I greatly also struggle with. I would like to add a similar layer on top of the prices I am charged by every query like Google (see here: developers(dot)google(dot)com/places/web-service/usage-and-billing) but I haven't got that far yet.

I would like to thank IH community for giving valuable feedback and everyone who has tested Walkway even a little, since that is also valuable data to look at. This is the first product I am building and I am kind of going with the flow with it and trying to learn things along the way as I proceed to make it better.

Here is also a small wrap up about what Walkway is, or is aiming to be and why I am building it:

"Walkway is a service that helps you to find places around the world."

I started building Walkway since I didn't quite like the fact that Google Maps was the only place to find information, which is available through their Google Places API, which basically includes community driven results about places around the world. Google Maps didn't have the filters and options I was looking for, even though they do have that data available for all the places.

Also the Google Places API seemed like a great starting point from data perspective, as I could just start innovating around a big data set. I also haven't yet found ANY other apps, that would allow you to search Google Places.

If you haven't yet checked out Walkway, feel free to give it a spin at walkway.io - you have a few free searches every day on me for now :)

EDIT: Had to edit the links as I don't yet have enough reputation to post them.