Google's and Facebook's laziness creates opportunity for StartUps

Ever tried to search for stuff to do for the next weekend? If you are in a foreign city it's kinda hard to know about the city's activities you don't know who to ask and where to look for. When trying to find anything the obvious choice would be Google. However and most surprisingly when looking for events, Google isn't that helpful.. I tried to find a party searching for something like "san francisco sunday party" but a bunch of irrelevant information shows up. Also surprisingly Facebook, with a huge database of events, doesn't provide a good way to search for them, either you know the name of the event or you get invited for the event or you won't find it!

Well for me it's a big mystery why the big players don't provide a nice way to find events, to search them by location, dates, categories, etc.. There is lot of money in this market besides all the profits a search engine makes with ads, and I bet event promoters would pay even more to get their event appear on top of an events' search engine, there's also the chance of getting a commission for selling the tickets.

While the big players refuse to play this game others have the opportunity to play it. Eventbrite is probably the most known and most successful search engine for events out there. They do an excellent job providing an online and easy way to obtain the tickets. But in terms of easily finding relevant events I thought that I could do better and so I decided to build my own search engine of events.

I never had made a Website before so I had to do some intensive learning. I started my study with HTML/CSS and then gone to Javascript. I have been programming in Python for 7 years and I had some experience with C++ so learning the basics of web programming was faster than usually. For the server side I decided to go with Django since I already knew Python and the Django framework is beautifully documented in the free online Django Book. The hard part was going from the development server to the production server on Amazon Web Services, banged my head against the wall many times.. As for the design of the logos/buttons/banners I didn't even try!! A friend of mine (web designer) came to rescue and did an excellent job.

Finally, after 5 months, the search engine Let's Get Beezy was born! The users can control exactly the search region by using Google Maps. They are searching for Facebook events and so they have all the social information that comes along with it. One of the most valuable information (from the feedback of my current users) is showing the number of women and men going to each event allowing the users to avoid sausage fests and choose the best parties to go to. The site also shows all the photos that were taken in the place of the event and posted on Instagram and has a rating system to evaluate the events' creators.

It is very recent website and may not have many events in your region. If that's the case please log in the site using your Facebook account for us to populate our database with events from your region.

I am very interested in having some feedback regarding Let's Get Beezy and why you think the big players haven't yet provide us with an easy way to search for events!
Leave a comment bellow!