Startup Cities: A Tool For Collective Migration
Formalizing a new culture of crowdchoice, that can meme global relocation into existence.
We’re at the beginning of the startup cities advent.
I’m assuming most of you already heard about things going on in Miami.
If not, please read an exceptional piece written by Balaji S. Srinivasan “Miami Tech Week: The Start Of Startup Cities”
I just broke the fundamental rule of writing content, which is never direct users out of your post too early.
But this post is a direct follow up to Balaji’s write-up, so please read it first if you haven’t yet, and I’ll be happy if you remember to come back here 😉
This is also why I decided not to write an intro about startup cities, crowdchoice, and why the next silicon valley is in the cloud.
Now, one thing I found particularly compelling is the following open-ended question
Nomadlist.com and teleport.org are search engines for individual digital nomads. What does a tool for collective migration look like?
Followed by a neat call to action
We can and should formalize this in an app
The next day, driven by curiosity and inspiration, I decided to ask my team for some design help.
The UI mock has been created without a clear vision of what such a platform would be, not gonna lie.
One of the initial ideas revolved around it being more of a Twitter analytics tool that helps you learn what places people you follow visit or tweet about.
In a perfect world, it will allow you to understand where like-minded people live or like to move so you can relocate to a place where your mind belongs to.
Notice a caveat with the term likeminded. People you follow are usually someone YOU look up to, not necessarily someone with who you already have a relationship with, so it’s instead a unidirectional link.
Anyway, I’m happy that publishing it worked as food for thought and helped crowdsource and synthesize more and better ideas.
One concept is particularly interesting:
Going beyond a location search engine that just shows the sentiment is brilliant.
The app would tell you where you want to live. But, what’s next? There’s no in-app call to action to help you actually do it.
GroupOn for relocation aligns incentives to come, find out and make it happen.
We’ve just launched a quick landing page to see what people think.
Move is a temp name as we didn’t want to spend time focusing on wrong things, like name, domain, logo 😄 There’s still a lot to ideate about the problems, potential solutions, and general user experience we want to provide.
But all big things start small. We want to focus on exploring the problem space first. After all, it’s about crowdchoice, which always starts with a conversation.
Thanks for reading!