EdgeGuides was founded in 2022, and is an online travel & events guide with a focus on regional Australia. EdgeGuides came to Secus Digital in early 2023 with a small MVP product, a vision, and a small, dedicated userbase. EdgeGuides engaged Secus Digital to build out their product to quickly grow their business.
We have worked together across multiple engagements that have led to significant improvements to their product. We have effectively rebuilt the entire product into a scalable, performant application.
Developing a Product Strategy and Roadmap
We began working with EdgeGuides by building out a product strategy and roadmap. As the business has evolved and flexed to meet the needs of its users, that roadmap has been updated to keep it aligned with the business objectives. Despite the changes, it has served as a solid reference point when evaluating and prioritsing new features or development.
Trusted Technology Partner
We have worked hard to make sure we're building the right thing during each round of development. We document our approach and solution designs before each engagement, and have worked hard to ensure we keep a shared understanding of what we're building and why. We make solution recommendations based on experience and expertise, competitor offerings, and the requirements of the business.
As a result, the EdgeGuides team is comfortable entrusting us to make the right decisions for their business.
Rebuilding the Map
The map is a core feature of EdgeGuides, and allows users to browse around the country and find places to eat, stay, and visit on their travels. As the platform grew in terms of both Pins and Users, the existing map began to suffer some performance issues.
To fix those issues, we ended up completely rebuilding the 'Explore' map. It continues to use the same core technologies - Google Maps for the map itself, LiveView, and custom JavaScript on the client to make the pins interactive. The real changes were more architectural - rendering a smaller number of pins, improving the filtering capabilities, and implementing more client-side Javascript to improve the user experience.
Leveraging Notion to serve media content to users
EdgeGuides has a large amount of content on Notion, with a good mix of images, videos and written content. Notion is an easy and effective way of managing that content, and so we decided to fetch that content from Notion via its API, cache it in the application, and serve it to users via the platform.
We ended up building a custom Notion client that fetches and transforms content that can then be served to users.
Other Product Enhancements
We have made numerous other enhancements to the product, including:
- Integrated AWS Location Services to reverse-geocode places
- Adding user reviews and ratings
- Implementing a discussion forum
- Implementing events and event listing capabilities
We've also integrated a number of public datasets into the application. A key example is the Australian Public Toilets dataset, that lists all public toilets and dump sites across the country. These are refreshed and published onto the application each week.
Outcomes
Since engaging Secus Digital, EdgeGuides has launched publicly to the market, is looking to expand internationally, and has grown its user base by 400%.
They've recently begun working with a number of large regional tourism and event organisers to promote tourism and attendance at some major events, like the Casteron Kelpie Festival.
