New Projects

Building: High-Value Cities

I while back when the pandemic was fairly new most of our competitors and my peers were looking at secondary cities to stay out ride out the uncertainty.

As an example: for a time I lived in Tulum, then Austin Texas, Omaha Nebraska, Chicago Illinois, Denver Colorado, Seattle Washington, San Francisco California, Las Vegas Nevada, and finally ended up in Costa Mesa California. I stayed at least a month in most locations. 

This frequent movement was brought on for several reasons number one was just having the freedom to live wherever I wanted to at the time, test out the waters in the cheapest cities possible, and test a theory I was developing. The theory went something like this, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco were losing their appeal due to the pandemic and big corporations and individuals might be looking for a city that has all the luxuries of a big city but none of the congestion and high prices of the larger cities.

At the end of this experiment, I decided to build a database called “High-Value Cities”. The concept would be that you put in an address of where you want to live and the site would give you a livability score similar to a walkscore.com but for digital nomads. The criteria for this would be how good was the WIFI, how close Whole Foods and Traders Joes were, the crime rate, average weather, the diversity of the city, cost of living in the city, and the density of eateries. The database would be geared to digital nomads and middle management working remotely. There are a few other sites including nomadlist.com and remoteok.com however they focus on other countries and I want to focus on the United States.

The key feature (what I really want) is to be able to enter an address and found out how far the Trader Joe’s and or Wholes Foods is from that location. I figure this can be done by using Google Map’s API service. There is currently a feature allowing you to see how far a location is within walking distance. If the database used an API call every time an address was entered to triangulate the walking distance between the closest Trader Joe’s and the closest Whole Foods this would give one set of data for scoring. The reason this is important is the two brands of stores do all the heavy lifting for the database; they do the market research, foot traffic in an area, and residential moving trends before deciding to add a store to a neighborhood. These particular brand place their grocery stores in normally upper-middle-class neighborhoods and are going to have high-quality food within walking distance as opposed to trying to triangulate the walking distance from a convenience store or distance to random amenities.

The other key feature is the calculation of “eatery” density. There are many studies suggesting the number of restaurants, bars, and coffee shops within a certain area can determine the amount of sociability within the city. This is important for a traveler or digital nomad since you don’t have to go to the office you won’t see people on a regular interval and as people, we are still social. For me, it would be difficult to move to a remote area with great WIFI but not be able to interact face to face with other people regularly.

If positioned correctly and built effectively you can partner with companies like Blueground.com or HelloLanding.com. It could be an add-on for companies like Zillow and Redfin. Or offer it as a remote location finder for employees of big tech companies like Google and big bank companies such as Goldman Sachs. There are many options.