We open sourced the entire Oh Hey World platform in early 2014. Since then, we’ve been working on Horizon, which is our 2nd attempt at making community accessible everywhere. (a 18 month recap can be found here)
We know location sharing is not a “problem” to the masses (one of our big learnings from the time spent building OHW) — but Oh Hey World is still a valuable offering to frequent travelers (digital nomads, travel bloggers, entrepreneurs, business travelers, and those on sabbatical or extended backpacking trips). It still gets new users every week who use it to track their locations, update their current location on their travel blog with our WordPress plugin, or text their loved ones upon arrival.
We’ve been on the lookout for the right full stack engineer to maintain and improve Ohheyworld.com.
Changes to be Made
Like many startups, we overbuilt. Oh Hey World is an amazingly powerful platform — but many don’t know what to do with it due to its complexity. The primary goal in the near term is to simplify the user interface to be 100% about the “check-in” and link off to partners/sponsors for everything else a traveler may need (finding friends nearby, things to do, hotels, hostels, vacation rentals, etc).
Revenue
I believe many people would pay for a native iOS or Android app that handles tracking their location with the correct privacy considerations. The travel bloggers using the OHW WordPress plugin may be a niche crowd, but they are the content creators of the entire travel industry – there is considerable value to getting new travel products in front of them.
Alternatively, a development firm could be built on top of the Oh Hey World platform. Considerable effort by travel startups (especially B2C) is spent getting the basic aspects of a travel offering up and running: user accounts, locations, social graph, city searches, and information tagged to those cities. Ohheyworld.com has built all that already. It could turn into a great developer showcase for the big travel tech companies such as Concur, Amadeus, TravelPort, or Sabre.
Long Term
In addition to the “travatar” opportunity (Gravatar, for current location), see my thoughts on how an open source project such as OHW could serve as a catalyst for a location based content delivery platform.
Why keep Oh Hey World running at all?
That’s certainly a legitimate question, given our focus is on Horizon. To be very transparent, the interest in keeping OHW running is the URL has good domain (aka SEO) juice built over 5+ years — as well as additional opportunity with increased distribution of the WordPress plugin. Lastly, every user who finds OHW is likely someone who would utilize Horizon’s offering to find people to stay with.
Who would be the ideal fit?
- A self taught Rails engineer (or one currently or recently enrolled in a bootcamp) looking for a real world product with users to work on as a portfolio/learning project.
- An engineer with a passion for travel looking for a side project with income potential down the road.
- Someone who wants experience overseeing & working on an open source initiative.
- Someone who believes in the power of travel, ands wants to be involved with Horizon team long term.
Are you an interested engineer? Shoot me a mail if so – drew at horizonapp co
Drew Meyers
Drew Meyers is the co-founder of Horizon & Oh Hey World. He worked for Zillow from September of 2005 to January of 2010 on the marketing team managing Zillow’s API program and various online partnerships. Founder of Geek Estate Blog, a multi-author blog focused on real estate technology for real estate professionals, and myKRO.org, a blog devoted to exploring the world of microfinance. As passionate as you get about travel.
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