428 places, almost no visitors

So I built Interesting Places. It’s a list of 428 places to eat and visit across India and Singapore.

Barely anyone uses it. 90 people visited in the last 30 days.

Here’s what I built, what went wrong, and what I’m trying next.

I built the tools before I had any users

Most of my time went into the stuff behind the site:

A Telegram bot. I send it a place and it gets added to the site. Only I can use it.
An AI concierge. You tell it what you’re looking for and it suggests places from the list.
An admin publish pipeline. If someone submits a place through the site, I can review it and publish it. Nobody has submitted one yet.

All of it works. None of it gets people to the site, and that was the real problem.

The numbers are small

Places listed: 428
Visitors in the last 30 days: 90
Where they came from: 82 of the 90 came direct
Questions asked to the AI concierge: 10
Time since I started building it: about 7 months

Why I think nobody’s coming

I read Brian Lovin’s My playbook for shipping side projects and it was basically a list of things I didn’t do. My honest take:

I had no way to reach people. No email list, no posts, nothing. 82 of the 90 visitors came direct, so it’s mostly people I sent the link to.
I built it quietly. I didn’t share anything while building it, so nobody was waiting for it.
I only shared it once. One post, then straight back to building. Easy to miss.
People from Google don’t know what the site is. Search sends almost nobody. And if someone does land on a place page, nothing tells them what the site is or what else is on it.
Nobody searches for a big list. People search for things to do in a city. A list of 428 places doesn’t match that.

Here’s what I’m changing

An email list. 5 interesting places every Friday. That way I can actually reach people, and it pushes me to keep adding places.
A banner on every place page. One line saying what the site is and what else is there, for people coming in from Google.
City guides. Places grouped by city, starting with Bangalore since it has the most places. People search by city, and a guide gives them more to look at.

I’ll share the numbers again once these are live. Even if they’re still bad.

Interesting Places is at interestingplaces.in. Everything else I’m working on is on Projects.

I built the tools before I had any users

Most of my time went into the stuff behind the site:

A Telegram bot. I send it a place and it gets added to the site. Only I can use it.

An AI concierge. You tell it what you’re looking for and it suggests places from the list.

An admin publish pipeline. If someone submits a place through the site, I can review it and publish it. Nobody has submitted one yet.

All of it works. None of it gets people to the site, and that was the real problem.

Why I think nobody’s coming

I read Brian Lovin’s My playbook for shipping side projects and it was basically a list of things I didn’t do. My honest take:

I had no way to reach people. No email list, no posts, nothing. 82 of the 90 visitors came direct, so it’s mostly people I sent the link to.

I built it quietly. I didn’t share anything while building it, so nobody was waiting for it.

I only shared it once. One post, then straight back to building. Easy to miss.

People from Google don’t know what the site is. Search sends almost nobody. And if someone does land on a place page, nothing tells them what the site is or what else is on it.

Nobody searches for a big list. People search for things to do in a city. A list of 428 places doesn’t match that.

Here’s what I’m changing

An email list. 5 interesting places every Friday. That way I can actually reach people, and it pushes me to keep adding places.

A banner on every place page. One line saying what the site is and what else is there, for people coming in from Google.

City guides. Places grouped by city, starting with Bangalore since it has the most places. People search by city, and a guide gives them more to look at.

I’ll share the numbers again once these are live. Even if they’re still bad.

Interesting Places is at interestingplaces.in. Everything else I’m working on is on Projects.