Buzlee Case Study
Building a Community Platform from the Ground Up
- Industry
- Consumer App
- Role
- Product, Design, Engineering
Capabilities
- Mobile App
- Product Design
Buzlee is a digital bulletin board for small towns: one feed and one map for what is on this week, posted by local businesses and approved by a person. No ads, no ratings, no ranking algorithm.
Background and Context
The founder approached me with an idea to create a hyper-local app out of frustration from the noise and clutter of social media and ads when trying to find events and activities nearby.
Establishing the key differentiator
Social platforms bury local events under ads and ranking.
My MVP defined and positioned Buzlee as a platform that did not run on algorithms, ranking, or reviews.
The Vision
Give every resident one feed and one map showing what's happening this week
One map, ordered by date
The app opens in Westchester County focusing on the user's hometown. Flyers are clustered based on zoom level and distance.
Buzlee's experience was designed for people who just want to get the info on what's going on nearby.
Residents filter by tag, date and town, save a flyer, add it to their calendar, or share a link that opens the app.
A robust geolocation and auto-complete system
One of the more challenging aspects of the build was finding the right service provider for geolocation, map rendering, and auto-complete.
From the start, I focused on portability and cost at scale. I landed on using Maptiler and Geoapify. This kept our infra costs low with incredible rooftop address coverage.
One flyer, many dates
Just as you would see in the real world, I implemented flyers to be able to support multiple events. This reduced the workload for businesses and made discovery effortless for residents.
Admin Workflow
The success of an early dual marketplace app like Buzlee heavily depends on a robust admin experience.
I spent a month building out approval and content moderation features including a NextJS web app to ensure admins are able to onboard new businesses and perform data entry at scale.
Results and Impact
013 Months
App and Playstore approval and publish
0250 Local Businesses
Onboarded within 3 weeks
0380 Flyers
Published since launch
04100
Daily Active Users and climbing steadily