How do you manipulate the built realm, the physical realm, to allow people to live better lives? And I realized that there was a disconnect in how our digital spaces were designed for that. And we were using technology as a destination, like all the social media. outlets out there in the big tech players, rather than a tool that facilitates real-world connection and gets you connected to the physical space instead of us all looking on our phones.
And so that's how kind of Townspot came about. And Townspot's kind of my way of bringing that digital placemaking into people's everyday lives, really. This is Small Press Big Ideas, a podcast about the business of local news in the United States.
I'm your host, Paul Gewertz. Small Press Big Ideas is about the opportunities and challenges that local news publishers are facing for their businesses. I'll sit down and talk with journalists, entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, and more in the local news industry. to find out what's working, what isn't, and how the local news ecosystem can innovate and flourish in the 21st century.
Joined by my first Brit on the show, Mike G. Mike is the founder of Townspot, where they bring the best events on your doorstop. Doorstop. They bring the best events on your doorstop to help you live more local. Mike, thank you for coming on the show. We had a nice call before, but it's good to see you again, man. Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. First ever podcast, so I'm looking forward to it. Nice, nice. I've got a professional setup somehow.
Got a light here, got a microphone and stuff like that. So, yeah, I feel very pro right now. Cool. Well, for the audience, could you tell us just a little bit about your background of your life and your career? Yeah, love to hear it. Yeah, so my name is Mike Gee. I'm British and grew up in the north of England in a sunny place called Blackpool.
Actually, not sunny, so that's going to be quite funny for a lot of British people. And then I studied architecture. So at university, I went to study architecture, to design buildings. So I really, really enjoyed that. And did that for three years and then went to work in an architectural office in London for two years. And that was really great because during those two years, I realized that as much as I love designing.
and creating places and also like creating buildings that facilitate social interaction between people and improve people's lives is that the reality of architecture is very different. So I was designing, I had a great time, but I was designing high-end residential buildings for rich people in Mayfair in London. New at the time, I wanted to do something a bit bigger in society in terms of how social impact and obviously technology back in 2013, 2014 was kind of obvious that you could...
you could move the dial on some pretty big social issues with the right recipe of design. And so, yeah, 2015, got into the tech industry. And I've worked ever since across design and product management, always been interested in coding, kind of tried to code about two or three times, but I've always ended up on a stack overflow somewhere, just scratching my head.
And so, yeah, gained a lot of experience across many different teams working across social impact, but also the private sector. Favorite thing there in social impact was going to Africa. I saw design apps.
in london and go to kenya in the countryside and use a test with with teachers awesome company to work for back then and yeah just i've always been really interested in placemaking so that comes from architecture so really about how do you how do you manipulate the and i'm going to sound like an architect how do you manipulate the built realm the physical realm to to allow people to to live better lives and i realized that kind of
There was a disconnect in how our digital spaces were designed for that. And we were using technology as a destination, like all the social media outlets out there in the big tech players. rather than a tool that facilitates real-world connection and gets you connected to the physical space instead of us all looking on our phones.
And so that's how kind of Townspot came about. And Townspot's kind of my way of bringing that digital placemaking into people's everyday lives, really. Yeah, I was going to say that that kind of connects some dots on what I know, what the audience will find out about Townspot.
getting into the building things, the social impact stuff, all that. So what, maybe not so much what is Townspot, but what was the kind of origin of Townspot? I don't know if that's what it was called right out of the gate, but... When it launched, what did it look like? How does it morph? Just tell me. Let's just go back to the founding. When you started Townspot, what was that process like? And what was it originally? Yeah, I mean.
I think with anybody who started a passion or an obsession like this to start a company, it comes from many different streams. I think one stream, the earliest one, was growing up in Northern England and living in a town whereby...
It didn't seem like there was much going on at all. And that was really acute when I was at university and unfortunately my grandma, her husband, my granddad had died and I couldn't find... any sense of community around i mean she found a she found an art class to go to and she was doing that but i was you know that was the first time i ever dreamt it up so there was a success succession of different moments throughout maybe like
2010, like the last decade, where I thought, there's something here. At the same time, I was doing electronic music events in London. So me and a good friend in London, when we lived there, were doing really fun evening parties called Mix Motel. And we were finding places like Jamaican bakeries and old banks, and we were hosting parties in them. Not raves, but parties. And what was good about that is we had built a community around it, an interest-based community.
whereby people liked music and people liked the other people that were going to the event. But what I found is it was a one-off event across London. And what I found actually is that we would host an event. which i thought was really cool i mean we did one in a place uh next to brixton in london which is brixton's really hip area uh kind of like a brooklyn if you were in in new york but brixton uh next to there is a place called hern hill and we did
we did an event in a brewery where they brew beer. And so it was in amongst the beer tanks. And it was a really cool event, like just early evening again, and we had different amateur DJs on.
And some people stumbled across it and they were like, wow, what is this? We live locally, but we didn't know about this. And so kind of... I think also a lot of founders have got into founding a business, maybe probably they've been in events, like events is probably the easiest thing to start up when you're in your infancy as an entrepreneur.
and so then i was like okay i'm not so i don't really like this event stuff let's try and like abstract that up and see see what we can do in terms of like get more people finding out what's happening all this fun stuff which is around the corner So the origin story really started in 2019 when I started up a really simple weekly newsletter in Kentish Town in London, which is just next to Camden Town, where Amy Winehouse is from.
uh so just in that north part of london and i'd got involved with the local community center there and i was just astounded that there were literally i'd never been to an event in kentish town i'd lived there for two years i always just went from my house to the tube station to get on the tube and go to work and yeah i just like what i saw all these different organizations and all these amazing people in a hyper local setting putting on all of these events and there were hundreds of them
I just couldn't unsee it. And so I wanted to let people understand what was going on and find a way to bring all that fragmented information. And this, by the way, is not like, oh, Mike is discovered. a long-lost secret. Everybody's tried this. Y Combinator calls this a tar pit. because it's attractive you get stuck in there and it's people get obsessed with it and and passionate with it it's like a possession i kind of call it to people it's kind of like i can't get out of it i need to fix it
So basically I started this newsletter, like everybody has done, like there are a lot of local newsletters and this is pre-COVID and it was really cool to see that trend happen through COVID where people were like, had a time to think about what was going on locally and had some... thinking space some headspace to think okay that thing that we used to all cherish and the bedrock of human life called community how about i get connected to that
And so it really chimed well with what I was doing with Townsport and it grew quite quickly, that local newsletter. And it was just events listings because I don't believe, I think, well, data suggests that. event listings are the most popular things on local news websites people always go on the what's on and it's just something people want so in in in the in thinking about design thinking in general
It's all about what you take away. Make things simple. Keep it simple, stupid. So as long as you take away everything else, then... You just have simple event listings. We have an emoji next to the title. So there's no photos. So there's a democratization of if someone's just popping up a yoga class. and doesn't have access to a graphic designer in a yoga studio is not up against someone who has really good graphic design skills and can produce a really good poster.
So I ran that newsletter for a while, but it's taken a long time to get to where it is today, because where it is today is that it's essentially a hyper-local events platform. As I mentioned before, I tried to code two or three times, failed. And then AI comes along and it's sort of allowed people like myself to be, I was talking with a friend about this earlier, being absorbed by AI.
Because we have all of these creative ideas that we've wanted to build for so long. And projects like Townspot, even though Y Combinator call it a tar pit, I'm hoping now the economics have changed somewhat. So that someone like me with enough passion that can come along and design skill, which is really important on a product sense, they can come along and they can build very cheaply a piece of software that really solves.
what i think but i'm super biased is a massive problem in society of disconnection and especially as a lot of countries are talking about fragmented communities about how to how to get the party started again So how to get the festival started again in your area. It's as simple as that, I see it. People just need to meet each other. People need to be introduced to each other. Very simple. People just want to be told hello on the street. And that's it.
And when that breaks down, I think that's the real synthesis of community in general. It's like once you lose that kind of cheery hello on the street, you know, neighborly hello, which America is pretty good at actually, that signals the health of a community for me. But it's kind of, yeah.
I quickly realized after this newsletter that the problem was massive and there were loads of events happening. And yeah, I just felt like a super big duty to this day. And probably you can tell with how I'm talking about it and how passionate I am about it.
that frustration grew into town spot and i think like all products that evolve it starts with you probably being pissed off at some point and really wanting to fix it so so yeah there's you know okay i'm kind of riding solo on this at the moment and and kind of doing full end-to-end software development and yeah how how it's evolved since is is that if you can imagine that it's a calendar um a hyper local calendar that's kind of our tagline
hyperlocal calendar that you go on and it's and it just shows you the events in your area it's not like an eventbrite or where it's just events you don't really know where they're happening but it has this i think intimacy is a real big part of the concept it's like everything that i design for this it needs to feel like a neighbor sending you a message showing you what's on and it needs to feel really hyper local which i don't think and i haven't seen anyone catering for this
Yeah. Yeah. And it's kind of a, it's really good. A lot of these businesses and everything, it's a lot about timing and you hit the timing right on the head. Like you said, the pandemic kind of spurred a lot of the interest in... you know, people's local communities. Then AI came at the right time to help you push the thing forward in a lean kind of fashion and everything. So that's great. Excuse me.
Uh, what is the, uh, the reception looked like from, from people? No, you talked about those initial people that were like, Oh man, I didn't know this was happening here. Like, yeah. What, how does the public reacted to it?
So exactly that. That's the most common thing that I hear. And also, just to reiterate again, this is a super common problem space that a lot of people have tried to solve. And the reason why I say that I think that there aren't... many other people trying to solve it and the way that i'm doing it is because quite simply i think they've just died out um and like you say with the timing i've just been so bloody stubborn to stay stay in it for so long and get to where it is and so
For example, from the first few weeks, I knew there was something there because it was growing rapidly. as a weekly newsletter and people loved it. People were messaging me saying they loved it and when's it going to open up in new areas. We love that it's focused on... or the locality. And then we did like a quantitative survey, which was like 93% of users said that Townspot made them feel engaged with their community.
79% of people said it improved their opinion of the area. And 80% of people said it made them participate more in the local economy. And when you get stats back like that, then it becomes even more of a crusade.
Because you're like, okay, there's something here on a human level, like a human design level. Let's work back from there and work out what the back end of the business is like. And so we've had... support and backing from camden council in london so that's through a one-off funding pot so that's a grant grant money and so that's allowed us to open up in
three areas in london in camden town bell size park and kentish town continued but also those grant fundings are great absolutely amazing and i'm so happy that we've had them and it's a real privilege to get that money because it's i truly believe this has been like you said before i'm operating this in a very lean way so every every bit of cash helps and it's not wasted but the greatest signal has been we've had to
We've had some private sponsors as well. So there's a really great community-led, community-caring estate agent. I don't know if you call them estate agents in the US or lettings agent or the people that rent and sell property. Real estate, I think it's called in the US. Real estate agent. So that's local to Kentish Town. They're called Matthew James Estate Agents.
And they have been sponsoring us for three years now. So they pay £2,000 a year. That was the baseline fee of an annual sponsorship. And they use it to really good effect for their business because... They get the question of their customers who are looking to buy a house, to sell a house through them, to rent a house, to rent out a house. And they say, why should we choose Matthew James Estate Agents? And they use in their sales line.
Well, because we actually care about the community, we're the main sponsors of Townspot. And so that's an annual sponsorship. Their logo is on the website, on the calendar, is sent out on the weekly newsletters, and they get a lot of exposure. In the same way... I live around ELA in Manchester in Northern England. They are a residential management, again, community-focused group.
That's backed by a property developer who's built a buy to let 373 room or apartment building in near the northern quarter in Manchester. And for those of you who don't know who, you know, if you don't know what the Northern Quarter is, it's a very hip area in Manchester. It's got a lot going on, a lot of comedy, a lot of culture. And I think if you lived there, you would feel quite disconnected because you get a lot of tourists coming in.
We have subscribers to that calendar now who get the weekly newsletter and for sure they're enjoying it and going on the iOS and Android app that we have and looking at the events on there. And so it's just... I've intentionally kept it small up until now. This is probably why after six years, it's the first time I'm doing a podcast. I'm not a big believer in talking until you've got something. And so I've just seen these minor signals from...
for more different parts of the market i guess to say like this could work this that you've got money coming in from a private sponsor you've got public funding there's validation on there and so i'd say there's there's belief on both sides of that kind of funding model So, yeah, the reception's been really good. And it's been, just to round off on that, we've kind of been, Townspot's been a victim of its own from that weekly newsletter at the start.
We did a survey recently, and I don't know the exact stats. Let's say 200 people responded. Let's say 170-odd or something said that they just want the weekly newsletter. A small percentage of them said they actually go on the calendar and check all the events. But that's their way in. And it's also this aha moment that they have where they see this hidden festival uncovered around them.
they see on the calendar they're like wow it's kind of like a um you don't know what you don't know problem and it's like if you don't know these things are happening in an indoor culture that we live in then you're never going to find them you're never going to do them So it's kind of been a victim of our own success. And I've just worked it back from there, trying to work out the financials. Yeah, that's interesting. And some things you said.
First of all, it reminded me that I completely misspoke. You are not the first Brit who's been on the show. I completely forgot because there's some similarities to kind of what you were talking about to the other two Brits I had on the show a little while back. Okay. Mark Riley and Ed Daniels are their name from Madison.ai. Okay. And they have a project called HANA, which is hyper-personalized autonomous news agents.
Okay. Actually, you should probably talk to them because it's pretty similar. They're putting an AI platform to build local newsletters as well. Nice. And the reason I bring them up is because Mark had mentioned in regards to business model. He had several ideas for the way forward. And I'm curious if you thought about this as well, where one end he could build his own portfolio of newsletters, you know, across.
the UK, the world, whatever, Europe, or licensing it as a, like, you know, how do you have it on LinkedIn? A, I lost it. Hyper local calendar platform. Have you thought of licensing that side, the calendar platform to say traditional local media organizations where they could have it on their website? Have you looked into that at all or thought about that? I think that's probably a, yes, yes, I've thought about that. It's probably a future thing that might come in.
the main vision doesn't doesn't work and i think that yeah i think there are a lot of really good we used a really good calendar sas product called tokify i just want to give them a mention because it's run by an awesome guy called called robert in in london
And we used him as a backend for like three years. And so we would use that as a CMS content management system. And our team would manually... put all the information that they'd find in towns into there so i think there's a lot of like calendar sass out there and it's quite a crowded market and also it's just not it doesn't get get me going so it doesn't right it's interesting like it could it could act as a
I think anybody trying to do something like this, like start a business, I feel it's more akin to starting a fire, like a little campfire. And I think that... like you want to build your fire and and use your own source your own wood and twigs and all that sort of stuff but sometimes you need to get some gasoline from the from these other revenue streams and pour it on because otherwise otherwise the fire is not going to build basically
And I think that I've got something that I'm working on at the moment, an offering that is not a front-end white-labeled calendar, but it's selling more event data to current event listings companies. so so people who have already worked out their front end business model and things like that and are paying a lot of money for event sourcing we can bring those costs down excellent i um so
I want to talk. You have a background in design, and you talked a bit about the design. It's funny. I was just listening last night and this morning to a podcast, to How I Built This by Guy Raz. Are you familiar with that podcast? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He just had Craig. New Mark, I believe, founder of Craigslist. Fun to kind of tell his story.
And he was kind of saying how they chose, not that yours is a simple design, but they chose really early on to keep it very bare bones and simple and keep kind of a lean business model. And, you know, they were kind of one of the runaway winners of the early internet. Also people on... Listeners of this podcast might not be huge fans of Craigslist since it kind of decimated local newspaper classifieds and everything. But, you know, I would like to talk about the design of it and I'll link to.
townspot.co in the show notes if anybody wants to go check it out as they're listening or anything. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on the design of how it looks now. I love the way it's very... Sorry, it's early here. I can't think of the word. It's very... easy it almost reminds me of like an asana or something like that where you kind of see your workflow through the day it's very simple and easy to absorb like these events are happening at this time on this day
Has it kind of been this kind of structure from the get-go or what's gone into thinking and design of the platform over the years? I'm laughing. I'm about to... are about to go in on the current local offerings that are on the internet so basically the design so if you look at a lot of platforms that are available at the moment to local residents
Facebook has done a fantastic job of this. And Facebook still works really, really well in the areas that Facebook is still used by the majority of the population. So I'm thinking like Denmark. And I know that in Belgium, people use it pretty well. And so Facebook events work really well for communities and people find out about stuff on there. And I think unanimously across probably the world, the people like passionate local admins.
have started up Facebook pages just because they want to do something better in their community. However, and this is also next door, however, the way that's designed and... the free-for-all that is allowed on there. And because humans have negativity bias and we just spiral into negativity, unfortunately, evolution wasn't kind to us in that way.
It just descends into lost cats and bad parking, let's be honest. And so people just get disillusioned. So they'll join them, they'll go on there, and it'll just be useless information for them. And it'll be like, oh, I've lost a cat. Oh, someone's parked badly. or someone will be complaining about something else. It'll be usually negativity. So there's no sort of guardrails in there.
What Facebook did is it was built up on social and it came from the Facebook newsfeed and all that sort of stuff. I can understand from a design point of view, it came from there. Nextdoor, from what I can see, is they looked at how successful local pages were. By the way, Nextdoor is an amazing platform. They've done an amazing job to get to the scale that they've done. And a lot of people use it. It's just that I don't use it. And a lot of people, the town spot, do cater for now.
They don't use next door from what I've seen. But their next door copied Facebook pages, local pages, and tried to monetize that. What Townspot has done, like if I sat down now at the brief and said, I need to design a hyper-local events platform. It would not look like what you're looking at in your screen right now. And what's happened there, what's really cool, is that if you start with the user experience of the customer...
So if you start at the most optimal, useful customer experience and build back from there and keep it simple and don't try and or get, what do you call it? Get tempted to add things. Because we all love adding things. It's about subtracting things. Don't be tempted to add things. Keep it simple. Try and democratize it. Loads of people have asked me, can we add event images? The answer has been no so far. People have asked me, can we have a discussion thread?
the answer has been no so far because i'm trying to notionally know because what i'm trying to do is i'm trying to like good design comes from good constraints in any platform but to have a good design solution you have to put in because you've got a blank page usually, you have to be like, okay, what constraints do I want to pull here, pull into my blank page? And that's how the platform will look like.
And so that's kind of the preface for kind of what it looks like at the moment because probably what you're looking at at the moment is that you could squint your eyes and it looks like kind of an email.
because it's just text-based and it's got emojis in it and so it hasn't really evolved much from that but people love that because it's it's less overwhelming than looking at event pages with lots of photos on it generally images created by organizers as amazing as events are they don't do the events justice because the images aren't good enough and and so just a simple emoji um low cognitive overload to have a look what the event is and and really what uh
so that's kind of like it's been built back from the weekly newsletter which was just text-based and people that's what people loved about it it was like a it's like a neighbor friendly neighbor that's kind of our brand tone of voice friendly neighbor messaging you and saying what's going on And then the other side of it is that we've been trying to, well, I mean, when I lived in the UK and I live in Spain, in Barcelona, I think that...
I'm really proud of the UK when I go to UK music festivals, because that is culture. That is our culture. For me, that's our culture. We're built on some of the best musicians in the world, the best bands. And I think everybody listening to this would agree, probably. That has somehow been lost in all of our towns, like most of our towns. And even the towns it's happening in, people don't go to them because they don't know what's happening on their doorstep. So what I'm trying to do with the...
The festival vibe is I'm trying to extract, there's this really massive festival called Glastonbury in the UK, and every Brit thinks that everybody knows about it in the world, they don't. But Glastonbury is massive, it's the godfather of all festivals.
Coachella was started in the 90s from what I believe. It was inspired by Glastonbury. Glastonbury is magical. And so how do you extract some of that magic you feel and that fun and everybody being happy into the towns? And how do you create a festival vibe?
Linking that into uncovering a hidden festival around you is that the design going forward, and there's some elements in it at the moment, is that if you download the iOS app, for example, or the Android app, it says it doesn't say events schedule it says lineup and so
We're going to have a map in there as well, which is going to have a boundary line, which will show you all the different facilities in your area and the venues that you have so you can improve your local knowledge. And so a lot of the design is going to be focused around the outcome of trying to help you improve your local knowledge.
it's not just like i feel connected to my area when i go to an event and meet people no it's actually someone someone put on a survey once i know what's going on in my area but i don't have to go to any of it it's an introvert's dream and i was like
That is amazing. Okay, so this is not about getting all the extroverted people out and things like that. It's just giving people the agency and knowledge to know that they can go out and go and do these things. And really, like I said at the top of the conversation, the the digital tool facilitates the real world connection and as long as you can keep it tool-based and not like optimized for time spent on there as much
but then keep the resident in the loop with this automated weekly newsletter that goes out because the calendar gets filled up by a local admin and then the automated weekly newsletter goes out. So it's kind of like trying to automate the... the process of weekly newsletters but with a human in the loop and and the the calendars in the same way that local event facebook pages are built managed um admin
because they want to improve the area because they want to have some fun in their area they want to be more hyper connected because when you're an admin you're actually hyper connected to the area because you're the you're the one looking at what's going on and putting it in the calendar
you can set up a townspot calendar for free and that's that's kind of the model that's the kind of play on that side it's like let's get these calendars into as many towns across the world as possible and see what happens and have a bit of fun because the costs aren't that much like it's just me
And so if I can just kind of cover my costs on a personal level, then I'll just build this thing and just keep going. And really, like, the way it looks online, yes, that's cool. It's the design and stuff like that. But really, the feeling... of Townspot is that I tell you a little story about when I first felt like this is probably a good thing to pursue. I'd lived in a house in Kentish Town in London for two years.
And because I was doing this newsletter, I found out about this amazing, cozy, intimate venue. 22nd walk from my doorstep, Horiano Meeting House. And I went in there for a poetry night. And I was like, okay, this is cool. I thought no one was going to be there. Packed. It was absolutely packed to the rafters of people. And it was just like such a magical night. And it was almost like, I keep mentioning it, but like uncovering a hidden world.
And I was like, wow. And so that feeling, I want people to feel that. And as soon as you feel that and you're like, okay, I can start doing stuff and I feel in the community. And I spoke to someone at that event and I was like, oh yeah, you're local then? You're from here? It's like, oh no, we're from Hampshire, I think they said, which is for context about a two hour drive away.
I was saying, so there's this amazing event happening 20 seconds from my doorstep. I've never been to it. And I actually went back to my house to go to the toilet in the interval. And I came back and I was like, yeah, I've just been home. I'm a bit of a flex.
i need a sandwich i'm gonna run home real quick yeah exactly you want to use my toilet yeah so i was just yeah super i think anything at this level when you're trying to create a good product it's more about designing that that physical feeling what like emotional feeling that someone has when they when they do something with your product it's not just what it looks like and i'm not super proud with how townspot looks today but it's it's kind of still in beta mode
i'd say is coming out of it but we're onboarding some admins at the moment who want to run it in their areas because they use a um chrome extension called super spotter which um allows them to scrape events easily they like kind of tap through all the
event website sources and then they were able to load that in and it's like next event sourcing time which is awesome because it brought our costs down massively so yeah just just a really exciting time to be building i can help me to have these skills to be able to run a full end-to-end software house
and build this thing that I've always dreamt of. That's awesome. The phrase that stuck out to me talking about the design is the low cognitive overload. Because it is when you look at it and it's just, you know, Oktoberfest with a couple beers emoji next to it. cult with a guitar next to it. Probably not a different kind of cult. Cult with a K.
And it's just very like, yeah, what am I interested in? So my next question, and you just kind of talked about this, so maybe I'll kind of pivot it a little bit, was going to be about sourcing these events. Because that seems to me to be the highest... time constraint on your end and you said i think it was super sorcerer that you use any other tricks what is it yeah super spotter super spot yeah yeah town spot uh
It's called the SuperSpotter. Or it might just be called the TownSpot Chrome extension, but internally it's called SuperSpotter at the moment. Okay. Having a bit of fun. Any tips on... sourcing these events, other tools you might use, and also I'm curious about the local admins. Well, let's just break that into two. Any other thoughts on sourcing events besides kind of that tool? Is that kind of the main go-to now?
Yeah, so essentially we just use that internally and it's just something that I've created and designed over the past two months. And I'm just feeling all the pain of event sourcing. Like it's a real, real... chronic pain point in any in any anyone who's tried to do that and probably why people aren't doing it anymore it's because up until now i'd say with the super spotter event sourcing has been the worst thing of the of the whole business because
I think it averages around like three to four minutes per event, copying and pasting, high cognitive load, a lot of context switching. Everyone who I've spoken to who is... running events listings websites we're all doing the same so spreadsheet venue website urls in a spreadsheet clicking one copy and paste into into cms um So everyone's still doing that. And you can spend a lot of money doing it. And it's a real big cost because it's a human cost. And it's three minutes. And you can have...
I think in the northern quarter, for example, we just sourced two weeks ahead. So they have like 213 events going on. So it's quite a long time to do it. It takes like a full day, basically, to make sure that... you've got the quality right and so people in their spare time as a side project can't do that and then if you're paying someone it's is quite becomes quite costly per month um so what what we've done now
So I mentioned Talkify before, we were using that, but that's just a calendar SaaS platform, and we were essentially using that as a CMS backend. And we were pressing a button and it would update our database. Now it's all connected, which is great because we're going to soon allow people to spot their own events, whether they're the organizer or they just want to share a link on the calendar for other people to enjoy the, you know, if you've seen a poster in the community.
so more user generated like that and that's where we want to get to once the fire is being built up a bit more in a community in terms of like starting the fire getting subscribers in there generating activity. But now, like the Chrome extension, we alleviate context switching because all the sources are loaded in there. You just click, basically just tab through all the sources.
and then you have different ways to to lift the information off the page still a bit of tweaking that's needed but i spent three and a half months spent three and a half months when i realized like a code thinking that i was gonna create the events, the local events data base of the world. Maybe not the world. At least to alleviate our pain points internally.
And what I found is that you just build like a fully automated, there's probably a lot of people thinking about building fully automated scrapers right now. And what I keep saying to people, it's like what I learned from that is that... The human still has to check it at some point in the workflow if you want good data quality. What I'd built and spent three and a half months, it was pretty good, pretty comprehensive and pretty hands-off.
uh you still still were getting errors and so it's even more frustrating and then it's like you get an easy thinking well if this is wrong what else is wrong so the work didn't make sense so i was like okay let's build a human in the loop uh check it point of entry
um scraper so that's where the chrome that's what the chrome extension is and it's is working wonderfully so it's kind of don't replace the human with the robot give the human robot arms and so it's and i think a lot of people have probably done like tried to do full automation and realized it's not
For some things it's good, but for this, I don't think it works. And from the outside, another funny thing in terms of events is that, so you mentioned that company before who were doing AI generated newsletters. Venue websites are horrible. They are horribly laid out. They're all different and you have a multitude of different ways to display that information.
my worst one that i've seen and i don't like is that when people just they'll create a calendar of events let's say feels like we're in september now or coming into october october events and they'll create a calendar and then they'll just screenshot it and put it on their web page it's like Rammed full of events. I just don't see all these AI models by the top big tech companies are amazing, but I don't think they have the incentive to get.
to build full scrapers like that and also websites are blocking blocking these llms from accessing them so so what i've what i realized is you can get you can get 70 and i do this in barcelona you get 70 to 80 percent of the way there with setting an AI on a bunch of URLs and saying, like, give me the list this week. You can do that. Anyone can go and do that now. But it gives you a high-level overview of what's going on, and sometimes it gets it wrong because it can't access this data.
And so it will give you an indication. And I found events in Barcelona, my local neighborhood, that I've gone to using this method. But it doesn't give you the depth that Townspot gives you because Townspot is human created. It's got a local who has skin in the game. and wants people to wants to facilitate um wants to facilitate like events or like the calendar in their area because they are passionate about their area and what i realized is that if you're managing that remotely
you walk around the neighborhood and it happened to me yesterday because i'm just about to launch it in my my neighborhood here because you must use your own product i was like oh that's a new venue i didn't realize oh that's closed down and this information is not online and so it's it's like
It's kind of similar to sports events where like an American football or whatever, there's no automation in how that information gets in there. It's literally a human pressing a button. That's how it happens in football stadiums in the UK. There's a really popular app that people use called LiveScore in the UK. And I met a guy who does the data for that. And he's like, oh, no, no, it's just someone with an iPad with two big buttons.
The data has to come from somewhere. Yep. I think it's, to try and solve such a human problem, it's weird to take the human completely out of it. And I think that having these local admins, let's see how it goes.
It allows the local admins to use the SuperSpot to get hyper-connected to the area. At the same time, they understand what's happening in their area because they've looked through it all. Then they're able to share it with everyone else. And so they're sharing the good stuff with everyone else.
yeah it's it's turned what it's done which is amazing it's turned from my big sigh at the start of this little speech and feeling that pain into actually a positive experience it's actually quite nice to sit down with a cup of coffee or tea or whatever you want to do every week and spend an hour just flicking through some websites and letting AI lift the stuff and put it in the database. And then your automated weekly newsletter goes out.
You don't have to touch a MailChimp. You don't have to touch anything. It just goes out and there's an algorithm there that's built up from the success of the Townspot Weekly Newsletter where it'll include kids' events. old people events not just music and comedy and so it's it really caters and gives you a feeling of the pulse of the community it's this happening yeah that there has to be human in the loop that seems to be the trend the way space is going and i don't know if it's ever gonna
not be that way, especially with local events, local media, stuff like that. One last question. So you talked about the human element and these hyperlocal admins. I'd like to hear about that. Who are these folks and how are they? Is there like a compensation structure? Are they on a part volunteer basis? What's that? How does that work? Yeah, so I did have a mad idea that they would pay Townspot and do the work.
You've got to try, right? Sounds like that didn't work out. Yeah, no, it didn't work out. But you've got to try it. You've got to try it. And so that was one business model that I cooked up. Yeah, feedback. You have to listen to feedback. So imagine, I think...
The best way for people to imagine is that the people who run local admin, the local Facebook pages at the moment, there are admins there. Why did they start it up? Why do people start up Telegram channels? These kind of things. They don't get paid. And actually with Facebook local ads, Facebook don't offer an easy way for them to monetize it and to offer ads, local ads and things like this. so that that moves on to like i think a lot about incentives that you have to do because
You realize that even though you're passionate about your business, no one else cares about you. And so basically it's like what's in it for them. So they get this feeling of understanding. They become hyper-connected. They improve their local knowledge of the area. They basically organize.
all the digital information in their area in one place which is awesome it just gives them a sense of belonging and makes them feel at home and then the magic number is about 500 subscribers because when you go into townspot you'll see that there's a location selector
And then you have to enter your email and you get a magic link. But it's like signing up to a local newsletter and then you get access to the calendar. So what a local admin's job is to do, if they want to, they build up to 500 subscribers. email subscribers and that's a pretty healthy list on a hyper local level because ads can be very effective from 500 onwards i believe and people start to start to take notice
1,000 is the number whenever you say 1,000 subscribers to someone, people start to listen more, but I think you can start testing the water after 500. It's very easy to get 500 subscribers. We offer like the admins. We send... We send some marketing material to them, some digital stuff. So essentially, we kind of stole the idea from Nextdoor, which is just an A4 sheet of paper with a QR code on it.
signed by the neighbor and so they can the local admins can print that off and post it around the neighborhood or post it through doors whatever they think is going to be the best way to get these local subscribers and then when they get to a certain number that's when they can get an annual sponsorship so for example
We have Matthew James estate agents in one area. We have a property developer in another area. And so it's rather these incentives for these private companies to sponsor annually or just on a weekly basis, you know, ad hoc. So up to the admins. sponsor an area and so the admins take 90% of that ad revenue and we take 10% as a platform fee kind of similar to
Similar to how Substack works. So anybody can start a Substack and we only win, Townspot only wins when the person doing the work wins and they win more. That makes sense. The incentives are on all sides there. Yeah. I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to find sponsors. Like you said, local real estate agents, local, yeah, any local hype.
high-end business i think car dealerships i think um you know lawyers maybe that's it maybe that's just a us thing we're very litigious here yeah maybe that's the thing and what what i'm going to offer at the moment i'm doing personal coaching with these admins
because it's interesting to hear their feedback live and stuff like that but there will be eventually like a how-to guide like a playbook online available for these admins it'll show them how to it'll improve their skills because it'll show them how to build a business in their local area it'll show them
how to run social media adverts if they've never done that before. And we'll provide all the assets, so they don't need to worry about design. They know the branding's there. And they know that the branding chimes with the hard-to-reach areas of society, which is generally...
18 to 40 they're really hard to reach that demographic and so townspot with its branding and stuff and this kind of like festival vibe it's it's we're able to do it it feels like something for them it's like the people look at the app and they're like oh this is for me it's for my area got my sort of like more vibe a gem z millennial vibe let's say but we have people from all ages looking at it and yeah it's kind of like i said before it's
It's the cold start problem of starting a fire in each area. It's like in the northern quarter, we haven't run any marketing so far apart from within this residential building. which has 373 rooms or apartments. We haven't run any marketing outside of that because I'm just trying to see how much of a percentage of residents we can get on there to start off with because that's the sponsor.
It's obvious when you don't market something, they don't come. People don't come. You need someone to start the campfire and get the party started, basically. And when the party started, it makes a massive impact. And it's been shown to make a massive impact in the areas we've done it in so far over the six years. Cool. I imagine it would be an interesting play, not for somebody just starting it up and running ads, but for like a local business to do on their own.
Say I have a digital marketing agency and, you know, this is a marketing tool for them, you know. hours to put it together and then you have exclusive sponsorship for your local digital marketing agency etc etc whatever the business may be yeah and i think as it as it evolves like we've started with with annual sponsors because it's the most
Again, there's that word lean way of doing it because it's just a one conversation issue. But as the Townspot platform evolves, it will add new revenue streams within those areas. For example, we get a lot of requests of out-of-town events. So it's like, can you just put it on the calendar, please? I live in this area, but it's not in the area. Like I want to say yes, but just ruin the whole concept of it because it's like placemaked within the area. So there might be a paid feature out of town.
And it would say out of town label on it. There you go. You know, these kind of like fun, humane, community level tags and stuff, which you can do now with design because you can control the dev process. And then maybe Townspot Pro.
contribute and you get you unlock some more features on the map or something like this and or like a maybe we bring in so it's kind of like townspot as you look at it on the web especially it seems like one of those pin boards in supermarkets or something in your local community where people put flyers on there i'd like to sort of find a way to digitize that a bit more and allow people to put up any notices which will be paid so an advert essentially
And so all of this revenue will go to the admin and then Townspot just takes a fee. So it's kind of like really in its infancy in terms of all of this stuff. And I've got a roadmap in my head of where this wants to go and it just needs to get done now. But the other thing is that I only have a certain amount of runway until February. And this is all personal runway that I've saved up from freelance jobs and working as a designer in big law tech firms, for example.
And yet now we're offering a service, and this is like another part of the business, to scrape the event data and update your events listings website. So if there's anyone... that you know or anything like that any of the listeners know that has an events listings website and is probably falling out of love with it because the event sourcing is so painful and expensive then we can halve your costs and so that's what that's what i'm
in talks at the moment with an events listings company in london hopefully that goes through but with with all of these things it's a test i'm just just making up as i go along basically and it's sort of uh we can like our in-house team does all the event sourcing it's an internal tool with a super spotter and then we just press a button and it uploads your database copies it across your database and then you can see it
in your cms just as if a human would have entered it for example and it's just making that api connection so that's something we're exploring at the moment because i i want to continue working on this full time and it's been ace because i've been able to do that for
seven months now another four months before like the full runway goes and then also like another offering is that if people want to want us to just run the town spot in their area the calendar and just get that party started start the fire then there's a monthly fee for that. And so we can just do it like we have done. That's our bread and butter. It's how we've been doing it. So there's those three different things, like local admins can start them up.
and we give them guidance and coaching the other one is if you're an events listening company and you want the event data and he's that pain of event sourcing but then lastly it's like what we've done for a long time is like just just pay us and we'll fill the calendar for you cool very interesting
Yeah, but it's not a gold mine. It's not a gold mine. Because that's why Y Combinator again calls it a tar pit. But someone has to do it. And for me, it's about finding the right recipe. And hopefully it's the timing, Paul. I hope that... I hope with all these different variables that I've been talking about, hopefully now I can try and chip away at this problem. But I've been talking very...
very high level and very enthusiastic and visionary in this conversation, but really it's local event listings and everyone's tried it. But it's trying to wrap it up in the right way. Awesome. Great stuff, Mike. So... I think we're about wrapping up. Where can people find you at Townspot Online? Anything else you want me to link to or point to in the show notes or anything you want to promote that you haven't spoken about? Yeah.
Yeah, I think physically in Barcelona. If anybody wants to go out for a coffee or anything like that, I'm around in Barcelona usually. So just reach out and you can reach me on email at mike at townspot.co. We've tried to get the .com, but the guy's not replying, unfortunately. And so hopefully in the future, but it's .co, don't try .com. And yeah, so they can reach out there. I'm happy to talk to anyone.
If anybody just wants advice, I think that I've accumulated a lot of knowledge in this domain over the past six years. And what I've found as well is that probably... that you found as well because you're talking to a lot of people working in this area are very passionate kind-hearted people and just want to do the right thing and just also quite fun to talk to as well so i've made some some really good contacts along the way when people have reached out um
And I've reached out to them just for some advice. And it's almost like solidarity in a sector of the market or economy, which is really like local tech really doesn't exist that much. um and so it's trying to trying to sort that out um i guess that's where we differentiate it's like a lot of the companies are local media companies like i'd say townspot is a hyperlocal tech company um same way you have fintech or lawtech
but yeah if you want to run your own town spot for free just get in touch i can get you started like almost straight away if you've got an event site and you want cheaper sourcing you want to reduce your costs almost straight away and we just need to make that api connection then
get in touch and then also if you want us to run a town spot in your area and just fill your calendar then we can launch the hyper local events platform in a box for you so just email me cool i'm there cool uh can i put your email in the show notes Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go for it. Yeah, LinkedIn and Twitter. Yeah, I'll link to all that and the...
websites we talked about and everything. So if you're listening, you can scroll down or on YouTube, you can scroll down and find the links there. Cool. Mike, thank you so much, man. This was great. Thanks for taking some time. Awesome. Thanks, Paul. Thank you for listening to Small Press Big Ideas. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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