Six weeks ago, Steven had a wee idea. Walking through Belfast city centre towards the Rumble Laboratory, he spotted a business just about to open its doors, and started thinking about how discovering new places often was either by chance or simply word of mouth. What if there was an app that would allow you to discover and share new places around you? One week later, we had drawn some sketches, thought about the architecture, and made the first commit to the app we call Nuu.
Today, as we're getting close to releasing a beta version of the app to a wider audience, we thought we'd share some of our thoughts behind it.
Nuu is a web based app that helps new places reach a community of early, potential customers who want to discover and try new things. It could be places like a new coffee shop or comic book store, a crazy-golf course which serves cocktails, or even a tasty new co-working space coming soon.
Anyone can create an account and add places. You can comment on places you've been to or places you're excited about, vote up places you like (inspired by Product Hunt, of course), to get them higher up the list, making the newest, most popular spots float to the top.
This is what the list of places looks like. New and popular places float to the top.
Filter your view by category or location.
You can also see places added recently or opening soon.
Each place added gets a page with more information.
As this is early days we have focused on three cities close to home, Belfast, London, and Dublin, but we're planning to add more places across the globe in the next few weeks. You're free to do that now, already!
This is where we need your help. Create an account (you can log in using Twitter or Facebook, or just with your email address if that's more your thing), add a place or two, kick the tyres of the site, share places you like with your friends. Do let us know if you find something odd, something that could be improved, or indeed something delightful on the site. We really appreciate your help, and your feedback. It will help us make Nuu even better.
This is an early release, and will be continually improved with more exciting features, such as location tracking and notifications about new places, in the immediate pipeline.
We hope you like it, and that you'll find somewhere new on Nuu.