Elsewhere

Inspiration

We were inspired by Beli’s personal, social approach to discovering restaurants. Elsewhere takes that idea beyond restaurants by helping people find experiences across a city, including activities, outdoor spots, arts, and local favorites.

What it does

Elsewhere helps users discover experiences in their city through maps, filters, saved lists, ratings, and nicheness scores. Users can explore nearby places, compare experiences, save places they want to try, and build their own city guides.

How we built it

We built the mobile app with Expo and React Native. Convex supports the backend, while Vercel serves the frontend. We added location support, map views, city search, filtering, personal ratings, saved lists, and nicheness information for each experience.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge was keeping the app simple while including maps, filters, ratings, saved places, and local discovery details. We also worked through Expo Go setup, device connections, package installation, and making sure the app could run consistently during testing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a working city discovery app with a clear visual style and interactive features. The map, filters, ratings, nicheness scores, saved lists, and city-guide flow all work together to make discovering places feel more personal.

What we learned

We learned how to build a mobile app with React Native and Expo, connect frontend and backend tools, work with location-based data, and design a product that makes a lot of information feel organized and easy to use.

What's next for Elsewhere

Next, we want to expand the experience catalog to more cities, add user accounts and persistent data, support real friend reviews, and improve recommendations based on each user’s preferences and activity history.