Lokalo

Inspiration

People travel, you travel, I travel, we all do, but there is a difference between traveling somewhere and experiencing it, the inspiration for this startup is to create an environment where you live like a local of a city, state, country. Based on where you are you get to live like you have stayed there for your entire life, this means navigating around to where you stay, where you eat, everything. This is my inspiration for this startup. It also helps that my startup idea has been validated multiple times too, once during a hackathon and most famously by Garry Tan, which shows there a need for this in people's lives. Here is the link showing Garry's market validation: Garry Tan's post

What it does

Lokalo is your platform for getting stays, diners and soon stores based on your location for a truly local experience, unlike Airbnbs that feels too official for your stay, you get to actually live in local hotels, eat local food from their diners and live like a local and very soon shop like them too. Future implementation would also include a map for direction (when I mean future implementation I mean as soon as next weekend, this submission is for the hackathon, I will keep working on it on the live link, the link submitted here will be for test purposes and hence will lag behind the live one). Living somewhere should be personalized, from their language, to their culture to their food to their stays, lokalo provides a platform for experiencing how locals live.

How I built it

Previous iterations

At first I actually made use of firecrawl to crawl web pages and give results based on location, but you can already guess the issues with this method, inconsistencies in crawling, and a whole lot of legal troubles too (I am not ready for that yet).

Current iteration

I actually stumbled across this hackathon a bit earlier but forgot about it till last week or so, going through the docs I actually liked the concept because it is a real time saver for me. I can forget about inconsistencies when serving places for users and that solves a major problem for me.

Lokalo is built using qloo as the recommendation engine for users based on certain parameters or filters (which is fast growing too) and serves them these recommendations based on these filters. The user can then check for the location of these recommendations relative to their location and get directions there, and in the future will be able to interact more with some of these recommendation. This submission is currently a proof of concept for the recommendation engine and for a little bit of interaction with the user.

Challenges I ran into

Qloo tags

One of the challenges I ran into will be the tags, qloo has a LOT of tags and hence it can be quite overwhelming to filter through, there is the tag search endpoint but frankly it has its limits, for example, searching for the business tag would give you a whole bunch of tags to go through and in some cases would not give the correct tags required (I really don't know if this is a personal experience due to the endpoint being used).

Qloo filters

Qloo's filters are really important for lokalo, this filters help give the users what they need and most of the time the filters just straight up don't work, as an example using the:

// &filter.exists=properties.hours
// or
// &filter.exists=properties.price_range 

for things like hotels do not work, my understanding is that hotels that don't have these properties would be exempted but it really doesn't work, it still brings hotels that do not have this property, again I don't know if this is a personal issue or due to the endpoint being used.

Qloo image

Some of the images in qloo do not work for the recommendation, hence it is not fully advised to use them as thumbnails for showcasing a hotel or diner as I did, this will definitely be fixed using alternative methods in future iterations.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am really proud of the recommendation engine actually, I love how easy qloo makes it and the large dataset it gives for recommendations for taste and the likes, I love how the app turned out to be honest and I am really proud of the idea and concept of this.

What we learned

I learned about qloo, it is a lifesaver for getting tastes, recommendations and so much more based on demographics and other factors (or filters)

What's next for Lokalo

I am entering the shipathon hackthon with this idea to bring it more into fruition, this means a mobile app for android, sadly I do not have a mac so I won't be able to release for iOS just yet, hopefully, this can be fixed in the future. Lokalo will also be a full startup that will be released sometime in august or september depending on the maturity of the app by then, I am fully committed to making this app a full company that can grow higher than Airbnb, the space is extremely under-saturated and even companies that plan trips do not account for the vast dataset that qloo provides to the user. My next plans for lokalo includes the following:

• Continue building and launch soon
• Enter the shipathon with this idea for building on android and later in the future for iOS.
• Hopefully win the shipathon for the extra marketing
• Look for funding opportunities wherever possible All these in no particular order of course.

Built With

• api
• better-auth
• mongodb
• nuxt
• qloo
• typescript