I spent a lot of time building Coffee Radar. I didn’t count the hours, but I started working on it in August 2022.
Then yesterday I stumbled upon this video:
I highly recommend watching it if you’re building your own MVP for your indie project. I realized that in my case I got the MVP building process all wrong. I should’ve released the first version of Coffee Radar months ago 🙂
And I probably focused too much on adding features, that aren’t still validated by users that may be interested in a website like this. So I will release the first version way sooner.
However, I’m almost ready to launch a closed beta, and whoever is interested in trying Coffee Radar can join.
Coffee Radar is a website I’m building that helps users find coffee shops suitable for remote work, providing information on coffee quality, work environment, and Wi-Fi speed for each location. Of course, the site is not only for finding locations for remote work. The main priority is to help users identify places that are capable of serving amazing coffee, of all kinds.
In this post I wrote about the current features of the website.
Let’s start from the main screen. I took some inspiration from Google, in a sense, but also from Nomad List.
Nomad List displays some results immediately, which is great. But in our case, Coffee Radar could have tens or even hundreds of thousands of Coffee Shops spread all over the world. To keep things simple, we can’t predict the results useful for the user until they will input something in the main search box.
We could try to get their location, but it’s invasive, and in a time where VPNs are getting more popular, the results may be completely useless. Users may get the best Cafés from London while they are in Paris, for example.
Here’s how the first screen currently looks like. Bear in mind that everything it’s WIP, so the design may (probably will) change:
The main search box you see is powered in part by Google Maps. You can search a city, a country or a specific place.
The buttons you see right under the search box, are quick filters that you can activate. These will likely not be in the MVP, as I realized that I need more time to build them.
The idea, is that these quick filters will help you to quickly restrict results for what you need. The filters you see there are just examples, and if you’re interested in trying the website before it goes public, I will ask you what filters would be the most useful for you.
In my case, I’m a big fan of cappuccinos and of working remotely with a laptop from cafés. So I would select “Top Rated Cappuccino” “Fast Wifi” and “Power Outlets”, and then type my location.
Some filters are actually some sort of awards automatically assigned to a place, like Top Rated Cappuccino, with a specific algorithm.
Filters become more detailed in the next screen, as soon as we hit search.
Here’s how the next screen looks like:
The first thing you see, is that we have more extra filters. We can change the results range up to 400 KM (248 Miles). And if we click on the “All Filters” button, we get even more filters:
And this is one of those areas that I probably got it wrong in the MVP. I already added a bunch of filters even though the website has a limited number of Cafés 🤦♂️
But let’s continue. After you filtered the list, and you select a place, here’s what you will see in the single café page:
If you click on the address of the place, Google Maps will automatically open, it will set your location as the start location and the coordinates of the place as your destination. You will be redirected to the screen in Maps where you can choose how to navigate: by car, public transport, or on foot.
On the right side, you will see a bunch of details about the place. We start with the most important thing: COFFEE.
Right now, I’ve organized that area into 4 possible coffee beverages. I know I know, of course we miss a lot of them: flat white, macchiato, v60, siphon, etc… but for an MVP, I think it will be OK, and we will see what YOU think about them 🙂
I will need to know what interested users think, and we will change the fields depending on your feedback.
Then we have some details about the location, and some details about the Work / Study part. For now I’ve included the bare minimum, the answers to 2 questions: are there electrical outlets you can use in that place? Is the wifi good?
Even though the goal is to add more information as well later this year:
There’s also a user area, but I will explain that in more detail in another post, or maybe I’ll just show it with a video. In a nutshell, in the user area you can manage your reviews and access a page where you can also add the cafés you know.
And that’s it. In brief, this is the current state of things with the website.
Also, at this stage, I have a private Trello board for this project. I will create a public Trello board where users who will try the website can submit new ideas for features and follow the development of the website more in detail
Thank you for taking the time to read this post! I’m looking forward to receiving your feedback while I continue to build this!