Exciting #flightschools updates: - First school ever reached out and verified their profile! I tried to upsell them on a sponsored listing, let's see if it works. - Added 400+ new schools to the list. The total number of schools being tracked is now 2,457 and counting across all 50 states! - Flying Clubs are now listed alongside traditional flight schools - but only if they have flight instructors available to train students. These sort of clubs are often the cheapest way to get your pilot's license, so it was about time I added them to the site. - Aircraft billing is now way more obvious: the website shows you whether or not a school charges in tach hours or hobbs hours and explains the difference (see below: "TACH" tag visible next to hourly pricing). There's often a 25% cost difference between the two! - Admission fees, monthly membership dues, and other flight school/club fees are now taken into account for cost calculations. Some schools that previously ranked higher now rank lower due to hidden fees and hobbs vs. tach hours, and so on.

Hit 50 signups #flightschools

Hit 500 clicks in 28d #flightschools

Fix map attribution because CARTO got mad that I was using their basemap, whoopsie #flightschools

See nice user signup chart going up and to the right #flightschools

Add location-based search functionality & nearby schools to the landing page #flightschools

Automate scraping flight school data and also auto kick off a cloudflare pages rebuild every time new schools are added so google picks up the changes #flightschools

Move all data to postgres and optimize search so I can start doing interesting queries like "find all flight schools within 25 mi of my location" with postgis Also allows me to automate scraping new schools and inserting into the db (used to have all data in a .json file, but that's cumbersome to update as the app would have had to read json, add rows, rewrite json, rebuild entire backend just to update one row - sql is much better) #flightschools

Hit 25 signups #flightschools

Optimize large pages to allow them to be indexed by precomputing quality scores #flightschools

Hit 250 clicks in 28 days #flightschools

Try cold email to get a flight school to sign up for #flightschools sponsored listings 🤞 I will try a message similar to this one on a handful of schools, and if it gets a good response rate then I'll scale to thousands of schools

Improve advertising page to be slightly more honest. I can't guarantee my 30k unique visitors are all "student pilots" so I shouldn't promise that to prospective buyers Now listing "unique visitors" in the headline to be 100% accurate with what I'm selling since the best I can do is look at Cloudflare stats and not interview 30K visitors to see if they're students Also add featured listing preview so buyers can see what it looks like + different icons on the pricing table #flightschools

Add featured listing page @ $99/mo and hook up stripe, thanks @marc for the push: flightschools.fyi/advertise/ Now emailing the flight schools that have signed up to see if they'd be interested #flightschools

Improve "cheapest flight schools" page to include a map and only show the top 25 results to see if Google likes that better If it works, I'll move to using this approach on other pages #flightschools

See second discovery flight request roll in and forward info to the school again - might be time to automate this email! #flightschools

Added "reset filters" and X buttons to clear individual fields as I noticed users were struggling to reset filters after typing in a bunch of stuff on the search page #flightschools

Add 50+ new flight schools by rerunning the scraping job with some fixes #flightschools

See first ever student sign up on flightschools.fyi and book a discovery flight! Emailed the flight school to pass them the first lead for free. My email copy could probably use work but better to move fast. May follow up later and see if they're interested in a sponsored listing, think I need more traffic and interested students to ask for that. #flightschools

See first 2 random users sign up! (excluding my test accounts) #flightschools