Why not make discovering the city a competition among friends & acquaintances?

That’s a question on my mind recently. I spent a month in Medellin, Colombia (some thoughts here). There was (and stil is) a strong community of expats there – most of whom are either teaching English or digital nomads – many of whom were fairly new to the city.

And, there were things to do in the area.

The challenge is matching them up. The people who want to go explore, with the others in the community that wish to see and do the same things. Few want to go explore a city by themselves.

So, why not a friendly competition among the expat community to help ensure everyone sees the city? The goal being to incentivize a larger percentage of that group to venture beyond their comfort zone.

What functionality is needed to deliver on this:

1. Group permissions.
2. A collaborative list of things to do, editable by anyone in the group (preferably pre-filled with some popular options).
3. Basic profiles that indicate which things on the list a person has already done, and which ones they want to do.
4. A group leaderboard.

It seems you could build this using FourSquare, Yelp, or Trover lists (doesn’t make much sense to re-create that functionality) — and add the profiles and leaderboard on top.

This would likely end up being a relocation application, which is essentially what long term traveling is; constantly relocating to new cities for extended stays. The revenue model could be to have real estate agents or property managers sponsor the experience for their specific city.

The problem is, it’s largely only applicable for the long term travel and relocation segments. The average traveler doesn’t really have time for this, given they are only in town for a short period of time. I’ve seen where a product targeted at that crowd ends up.

Anyone working on this?