[bdukic]

I built Thrail (https://thrail.io) 6 months ago wanting to solve my own difficulty to find and book quality outdoors activities in a certain area, especially when coming to a new place (tourism or recent relocation).

I think there are multiple reasons why it wasn't successful as I believed it might be, most importantly because I built something without first researching the market enough, and failure to do so got me building something which wasn't very helpful to people.

Another important issue was marketing. I'm developer myself, and even though I tried my best to get the word out there, the results weren't as good as I imagined they would be, on one side because I had no idea what I was doing, and on the other, because I didn't spend enough money on higher quality marketing.

I spent couple of months building it but I don't regret that time -- although this conclusion is probably specific to my personal situation at the time, where I had just closed the shop on my own development agency of 3+ years and wanted to get a break by working on something fun. Additionally, out of all the "weekend projects" I started over the years, this was the first one I actually "finished", and that means something to me, regardless of the outcome.

If I get into something similiar in the near future, I would definitely pay much more attention to the aspect of getting the feedback to build something people actually want to use. And marketing, definitely marketing.

[steamer25]

My friend owns a local outdoor recreation equipment/rental/guide shop. He actually said he'd kill for an app like yours based primarily on location. He and his wife like to go on road trips and seeing which areas have more activities available would help them prioritize where to explore. He cited the maps in the MTB Project mobile app as a baseline interface--the shortcoming with that one being that it's too narrowly focused on biking.

He's also big in the local Chamber of Commerce and said that lots of Chambers are willing to spend money to position their town as outdoor-friendly.

[roryisok]

Marketing is hard. Is there some kind of service out there where marketers will help you sell your app for a share of revenue?

I'm not trolling here, just in case I've missed a really obvious one

[bdukic]

I haven't come across anything similiar to what you're suggesting, although I'd probably be very interested in opportunities like that.

The closest thing I found to something like that was Simbi (https://simbi.com) but I hesitated to make an actual step forward as I never heard or read of anyone going down that route and wasn't sure if that was the "right way" to do it.

[kidproquo]

Crowd Supply[0] is one service that I know of. Mainly focused on crowd-sourced projects.

[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/

[mod]

Affiliate marketing is the thing, I guess.

[daveguy]

This project looks very interesting and monetizeable (by reaching out to venues for very targeted advertising).

One thing that doesn't seem quite right though.

Shouldn't location, not activity, be the first bit of information requested from the user?

[bdukic]

>This project looks very interesting and monetizeable (by reaching out to venues for very targeted advertising).

Yeah, that was the idea -- provide a high quality database of outdoors activities to the end users and then charge the providers / venues a fee for some extended information etc. But in order to even approach the providers / venues I had to have some kind of traction from the end users, which I failed to achieve.

>One thing that doesn't seem quite right though. >Shouldn't location, not activity, be the first bit of information requested from the user?

At the beginning I wasn't sure how to pull off the location filter nicely (should I use HTML5 geolocation, Gmaps geolocation, simple dropdown etc.) and just went without it but I have received this same piece of feedback more than once so I might go and add that, just for kicks.

[daveguy]

I would say, explicitly enter zip code as a first approximation. Easy and not something people generally have an issue with (they can enter work or nearby). The site put me in California, which I am not. I think you could get better traction with more accuracy, and zipcode will do it.

That and an easy way to add your favorite venue near you (since it looks like there is only one venue in the US outside of CA).

Visually and concept wise it looks interesting. I bet there are outdoor adventure meetups in most cities that would be interested.