The idea: An app that has reviews of places to take your kids by parents. No AI generated magic, just real people documenting their experience. Sproutings has a map of places parents have been with some ideas for new places to try. You can also coordinate outings with other parents using an outing planning tool.
The challenge: I sat on this idea for a long time because of the challenge that is mapping data. The best POI source you can think of is Google, but their terms are unfriendly and prices don't work for an indie dev. Other better priced options still do not let you store the POI data from their API in your own database. I was determined to have my own map view of all of the places people have reviewed, so I needed coordinates.
The tech: My solution to this was a postgres database full of data I imported and filtered from OSM. This gives me full control over the data to with what I want. So now I have a really cool map view with pins that can scale to millions with no problem using pmtiles. The client side is built with React Native. This was just so I could easily launch on web and mobile. On web, RN has a hard time with SEO, so I had to display some raw HTML / CSS here and there. There are also plenty of challenges with bugs that would only appear on certain platforms, so keeping everything aligned was a constant game of whack-a-mole.
Conclusion: I have a picture in my mind of a Sproutings map overflowing with places reviewed by parents, but the reality is that we have a chicken and egg problem. A platform that relies on user engagement to provide value isn't valuable until people have engaged. However, I'm hoping that I can reach more and more parents that would find it valuable and continue to expand its reach.
I'd love to hear of any and all feedback! Thanks for reading.