Visabug
See where your passport can take you.
Visabug helps travellers find interesting travel destinations. It is updated daily with visa requirements, country statistics, immunization requirements, cost of living, and more.
Chris Messina hunted Visabug and it launched on ProductHunt today. It promptly went to the #2 spot of the day, where it is staying now.
I didn't know much about the launch. Chris and I had spoken and he had agreed to help me launch, but it was supposed to be tomorrow.
Earlier today, I sent him an email saying that I prefer delaying the launch as I don't want to encourage people to travel at this time given COVID-19.
He messaged me back, saying that he had hunted me a day earlier and I was already in second spot.
I stopped buying my canned beans at the grocery store and rushed back to answer ProductHunt requests.
Chris Messina hunted Visabug and it launched on ProductHunt today. It promptly went to the #2 spot of the day, where it is staying now.
I didn't know much about the launch. Chris and I had spoken and he had agreed to help me launch, but it was supposed to be tomorrow.
Earlier today, I sent him an email saying that I prefer delaying the launch as I don't want to encourage people to travel at this time given COVID-19.
He messaged me back, saying that he had hunted me a day earlier and I was already in second spot.
I stopped buying my canned beans at the grocery store and rushed back to answer ProductHunt requests.
I posted Visabug on the React subreddit and it promptly raised to #1 where it has stayed for the last 16 hours or so with ~200 upvotes and 60 comments.
People seem to really like the user interface of the website. I got a lot of positive reinforcement from people saying that this application is useful to them. This is motivating and will keep me going.
There's nothing unique that I did for this launch. I was feeling bored so I posted it on the Reddit and wrote an in-depth comment about the tech stack behind the website.
I stayed online and answered 30+ questions that people raised about the website. Plenty of good feedback here as well.
Maybe I will write a blog post on how to get featured on Reddit now that I've done it twice in a week.
https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/f90oi9/i_built_this_website_that_suggests_places_that/
I soft-launched Visabug on Reddit's sideproject subreddit where it promptly went to the top of the page.
It has currently been at the top for about 4 hours. I have received over a dozen positive comments from redditors which has been very motivating. The post has a like rate of 90%!
In terms of traffic, I have received about 1,000 unique pageviews and it's continuing to increase. Hopefully, I get to cross 5K. That would be awesome.
A couple of learnings from this:
- Be genuine. I left an honest post about why I built this product.
- Ask for feedback.
- Respond to every comment.
- Tell people how they can help.
Now you can browse through countries faster. Instead of taking you to a new page, the page pops up in a modal.
The URL still changes so you can share the URL to get a permanent link to the country's detail page.
This was done by a use of iframes and the HTML5 History API. I feel like this will encourage people to search more.
Filters in are now a little more SEO-friendly on Visabug. When you select one, you get a humanized version of the text.
This was originally coined by Nomadlist, but I think it's a great idea. Building it is a little tricky though. Maybe I will blog about how to create something like this.
My next idea is to add these to the route so each filter permutation has a unique URL.
Due to the recent outbreak of Coronavirus, I've added some filters to Visabug so you know whether or not the country you are travelling to has had an outbreak.
I've also updated the travel advisories to reflect whether or not the country has had a virus outbreak.
It took me about a month but I finally have finished building the MVP of Visabug.
The last month has been a blur of coding (hopefully I can write about some technical challenges soon!). In the end, I'm pretty proud of how Visabug has turned out.
I'm looking forward to getting the word out and getting feedback from users! Everything in Visabug is free as I work out the remaining kinks!
I started working on Visabug over the Christmas holidays. It was super cold in Toronto and I was looking for somewhere to go. After a bunch of Google searching, Tripadvisor, Lonelyplanet, etc., I realized that it would be cool to have a lot of travel data in one place.
There were a few problems I wanted to solve:
- It's unclear to figure out visa requirements when travelling.
- It's hard to compare two countries to decide which one is more suited to your interests.
So I wanted to build a site that is somewhat like Nomadlist, but built for vacationers, not long-term stayers.
Since I love travelling (been to about 15 countries in the last 4 years), I thought it would be something I would be interested in building out.
I pulled out my laptop and fired up VSCode.