Show HN: Bathroom App – Find bathrooms near you https://ift.tt/G40Uyns

Show HN: Bathroom App – Find bathrooms near you Hey HN! We created Bathroom App - a free webapp to find bathrooms. Currently live in San Francisco. I've lived in SF, NYC and Vancouver and while all of these cities are very different, one thing that's shared is that it's a struggle to find bathrooms. I've had close calls where I've ran to 2-3 different places asking to use their bathroom before finally finding one. It's stressful and COVID has made it even harder. A "toilet finder" is not a new idea but the existing apps are disappointing. I've tried them all and they're either littered with bad data or don't have important information like access details (e.g. codes), cleanliness ratings, amenities(tampons, baby changing table etc.) and bathroom type (gender neutral, private or shared etc.). The challenge is for this to be helpful, the data needs to be there and it needs to be reliable. Our playbook is to launch in a major city > collect seed data ourselves > allow user input > manually verify new bathroom submissions or edits. For example, in San Francisco, we added publicly available data. Then, we added chains that have free bathrooms like Target, Safeway etc. And finally, we identified bathroom deserts, walked around those areas and mapped free bathrooms (we did that for 100+ bathrooms...it took a while). The result is a map that's valuable to people on day 1 - and we've already had locals contributing to it since we've launched. I've found that people who are particular about cleanliness, travel a ton or have IBS appreciate this product the most. But for most people, it's the kind of product you may not need daily, but when you DO need it, you'll be thankful for its existence :) https://ift.tt/NGalpx7 May 2, 2024 at 01:19AM