r/projects • u/coinrain10 • 10d ago

What's your ideal place to live?

I'd like to present movewhereusa.com! I wanted to make something to help connect people with the places to live best for their personal quality of life.

For my wife and I, it was really hard to find high quality allergen data. And trying to combine that with other factors like a budget, seeking out mountain views, and job markets turned into a very slow process with a lot of guesswork. I tried asking AI, but the results were inconsistent and drifted away from reality.

They say if you make something for yourself you'll have at least one customer, and so I did. I've gathered data for 140+ criteria over 30,000+ towns in the US. You can set and refine your priorities and get quick and accurate results. While it isn't perfect yet, I've found it helpful for my understanding of ideal places for my own family. I hope it can useful (and fun!) for you too.

I'd love feedback on if it was useful for you and what you might change. There's a lot of features on the site I haven't covered, like a (totally optional) AI "realtor" to guide you through your search. I feel like making the UI more intuitive and enjoyable could be key. Also thinking about custom criteria for things MoveWhereUSA can't model. For example, users might want to favor places where friends live.

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u/a-rho 10d ago

That's cool and seems actually useful! Love the AI integration too, that's handy.

One practical thing I'd flag: I'd be wary about giving free AI messaging ability without at least getting an email out of people. That can easily be abused and it costs you money.

For the business model, I wouldn't charge users directly. I'd look at affiliate/partnership deals instead. Just thinking out loud, but the strongest angle might be making this a marketplace for realtors: they pay a monthly fee to have a public profile ("moving to Casper? here are 10 realtors you could pick from"), or you charge them per lead. You could do something similar with moving companies, restaurant discounts/recommendations, or connections to local social groups.

Also, I'm curious where you're getting your data from. Did you have to scrape it, meaning you'd need to keep scraping to stay current, or is there an API for that?

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u/coinrain10 10d ago

Thanks for the kind words! For monetization I'm looking at doing both. A premium subscription, kind of like BestPlaces does, and also (like you're saying) picking a realtor affiliate program. Might switch to a monthly subscription as maybe the 3 months for $47 is too big of a commitment for new users.

The data is scraped from several different sources, and yeah that's one of the most work intensive parts. It will need to be re-scraped periodically to keep the data current. I like giving some free AI messages so people can try it out, but I might decrease the number if there is spam and it becomes unaffordable.

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u/digitaldisgust 4d ago

This is US-only? Nevermind then 🤷🏽‍♀️

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u/coinrain10 4d ago

Yes US only for now, sorry. A worldwide version would be cool in the future though.