Find the Perfect Spot to Work from Anywhere with Coffee Radar - Building In Public!
by Matt BonaciniHey everyone!
As a coffee lover and a remote worker, I know how important it is for some of you to find the perfect coffee shop to work from. Roughly a year ago, one idea came to mind. Why not building a website dedicated to this? So maybe every time we're in a new city we can easily find the best possible spots right away? Unfortunately, Google Maps isn't always enough, and it's not an app tailored for coffee enthusiasts and remote workers.
That's why I'm working hard to build Coffee Radar, a free website that helps you discover the best coffee shops to work from anywhere.
As a solo creator, I've been pouring my heart and soul into this project for the past 7 months. Since Indiehackers is a community of passionate creators, I can't think of a better group of people to share Coffee Radar with.
With Coffee Radar, you can find the perfect spot to work from, no matter where you are. The website will include filters like: coffee quality (specific per drink, e.g. Espresso Rate, Cappuccino rate, etc), wifi speed, size of the café, electrical plugs availability, milk availability (if you want to find a place with that specific milk type you will be able to do it!) and more.
I'm trying to build this website in public, so you can follow along with me as I create it. Follow me here on Indiehackers, or if you'd like, subscribe to my YouTube channel at youtube.com/@wordpressadvisor
I'll go live on YouTube and write some updates here as well. I have never built something in public, but my hope is to get your feedback and understand how to do it decently :)
At the very start of this journey, I streamed live on Twitch, before deciding to focus only on YouTube. I took a break for some months to work on the most complex part of the app (the backend). Now I'm ready to live stream again.
I'm excited to share this journey with all of you!
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This is a great idea! As someone who has been traveling for quite some time now, finding somewhere to work has been one of my most frustrating problems. Although solutions like laptopfriendly.co attempt to fill this gap, I find it extremely annoying to use and the suggestions seem to be unreliable or outdated.
An issue that some apps attempting to solve this problem struggle with is not being internationally available and multilingual. While it's great to see what other English-speaking tourists have enjoyed while traveling, sometimes the true gems are only known by locals.
If you are looking for a fellow coffee shop lover for testing or if you want someone to bounce some ideas off of, feel free to contact me. Keep it up!
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Hi Justin! Thank you for your feedback and for sharing that! I found some similar websites too, but yeah, they seem to be semi-abandoned or focused only on US-based cities. Or they have some really outdated designs / user flows.
Where are you from? I can definitely save your contact and can get in touch when I have a working MVP. So if you're open to it you can try it out
Making the app as less annoying as possible is definitely one of my primary goals. That's also why I'm going to start with a limited set of fields. I know it can be annoying to fill in forms with 20 fields :D
Getting updated data is probably the biggest challenge. Hopefully Maps + AI will help us with that. The catch is that when we'll start using the site in its very first version, it may not have much data. But I'll try to import the top 20 locations for the biggest cities (or cities that are point of interests for digital nomads, e.g. Chiang Mai)
Also yes, keeping in mind locals and finding ways to involve them, it's a great idea! Often that's one of the reasons why is difficult to find interesting places easily
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Awesome, I am living in Istanbul right now but based out of Toronto. My email is [email protected]. Feel free to reach out at any time. Looking forward to the mvp:)
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Nice, Istanbul is an awesome city to work remotely from Cafés :D I've been there. For sure it will be one of the first cities I'll add.
I saved your email address, feel free to edit your message and remove it (to avoid spam ;))Thank you again for your comment I'll definitely reach out when it's ready!
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would love to see this 'build in public'. Why not create product page here?
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wow! I didn't expect a reply to the post, I thought it was just in the product page. Thank you for your message!
Here's the product page: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/coffee-radar (but I think it's still pending and waiting for approval :) )
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Is it possible to get your product or post to display in IH group 'digital nomads'?
https://www.indiehackers.com/group/digital-nomads-
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That's a good idea! I think I will share it there if the moderator allows it - as soon as I have something more to show and possibly the MVP
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cool. following now.
from a mobile data capture perspective -- Do you have any plans? snap, upload, metadata-ize --- push data-set for big picture.
Similar to what these folks have done to crowdsource data capture
IOS/android of Citizen Scientist
https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/the-ocean-cleanup-survey-app/id1533071965
sample data viz from data-set
https://theoceancleanup.com/research/citizen-science/citizen-science-map/I am always seeking better tools to crowdsource data build. It is the trend to drive not only community data sharing (as in Coffee Radar), also radical transparency around 'what is seen, that big companies are simply not getting'. I love it because as its sorts out evidence, trust immediately. Eliminates marketing noise.
- suggest enable (what meta-data do you also desire). Crowdsourcing data design drives sense of building together.
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Well at first this will be a website (but probably I'll turn it into a progressive web app quickly, that you can install), for now I can't create a regular mobile app since I'm a web developer :)
There is a user area, so users can register and add their own data, either coffee houses/cafés and/or reviews.
I'm also trying to understand if with the help of the Google maps API + the OpenAI API I can extract valuable information automatically for each place (by letting AI reading all the reviews I find). Could also be that I need to use another AI api.
And also I need to understand if I can do this legally (getting data in that way) and if that's okay for Maps. So far I see that Maps is happy to share data about places (cafés) without restrictions.
For sure it will be a challenge at first to get traffic and convince users to share what they know, as the website will probably have a minority of cities and locations. I'm thinking about starting with a small focus group (maybe 10 people?) of huge coffee enthusiasts which ideally are also digital nomads or remote workers that use cafés to work. So I can get some feedback on how to improve the website.
I also found an API that helps to track in real time the foot traffic to a location, that would also be a nice addition, since it can help you understand if the place you're going to is crowded or not. But I'll add this feature after the initial MVP :)
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I was playing with this today, while in another cafe. https://topai.tools/t/textomap
It is slicker text to map than the other map platforms. But I still just want to snap and post a new listing or updated to existing listin gdirect into your platofrmWith the live text capability, now on the iphone, why type if I can snap.
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Cool.
re: data build -- crowd sourcing the data build, happens fast, when the ability to do it is snap/load. How else did google maps get built, stay correct? 'Add a missing place', 'Report an... "This approach to data build is the common strategy in the circular economy/waste-free world. They use one of the many open source map platforms. The trend I have seen is it works well when you want citizen collective action. Building together.
https://theoceancleanup.com/research/citizen-science/citizen-science-map/
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