GardaDay
Local discovery | BUILT | by Roberto Salodini
https://robertosalodini.com/work/gardaday

Lake Garda events in one place, designed and built end to end. 900+ events across 76 towns, 17 of them on live automated feeds.

Role: Solo designer and developer
Stack: Next.js (https://nextjs.org), TypeScript (https://www.typescriptlang.org), Postgres (https://www.postgresql.org), Claude Code (https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code)
Live: gardaday.com (https://www.gardaday.com/)

THE PROBLEM
Lake Garda hosts thousands of events a year, scattered across municipal sites, PDFs, printed flyers and Facebook posts. A tourist walking down the street has no single place to see what is on nearby. The project started as a favor for a friend and grew into a product.

CALL 1: AUTOMATE THE FEEDS
A scraping pipeline pulls municipal RSS feeds into Postgres and normalizes every event into one schema. Claude parses odd formats, flags duplicates and runs unattended. That covers the 17 towns with a clean feed.

CALL 2: ACCEPT SUBMISSIONS
It does not cover a town whose only listing is a Facebook post, or an organizer who wants to add their own festival. So GardaDay takes submissions too: trusted partners publish instantly, everyone else waits for one-click approval in an admin queue.

CALL 3: DAY, TOWN, CATEGORY
A flat list breaks down at this scale. Browsing runs on three axes instead, so it stays fast however many events pile up.

CALL 4: MOBILE FIRST
It is built mobile-first for someone scanning on the street, not sitting at a desk.

CALL 5: ONE PAGE PER EVENT
Each event has its own page with the poster, date and place, with sharing on WhatsApp and add to calendar.

CALL 6: BUILT FOR SEARCH
Pages such as Events in Desenzano and weekly markets mean the information architecture doubles as the SEO strategy. Every page has a plain-text version from the same data, so AI agents can read what is on without parsing the interface.

RESULT
- 900+ events aggregated since launch, 76 towns covered, 17 towns on live automated feeds
- 5.2K Google Search clicks and 108K impressions in the first 3 months, about 1.7K clicks a month (Google Search Console)
- Live at gardaday.com and expanding to the Franciacorta area
- Monetized with display ads and travel affiliate links

WHAT I LEARNED
Product design today is not just interfaces. Sourcing and structuring the data matters as much as any screen. GardaDay is the project where I found the problem, built the product and shipped it myself.