Localmint — Our Story

As our inaugural blog post we thought it most appropriate to tell the story of Localmint to date. The story of how the problem was identified and the way in which the solution developed will hopefully resonate with many of our users.

Late one night in 2011 Ranga’s young son was in a lot of pain due to a teething episode and he had just run out Calpol. Ranga immediately took to his laptop to find the nearest late night pharmacy in Dublin, but an hour later he was still none the wiser where the nearest one was. It was through this very personal and painful experience that Ranga identified that there was no service addressing this consumer need.

Ranga subsequently set about building a solution in his spare time, starting out with a very basic website providing opening and closing times for some local late night pharmacies in Dublin. Pretty much straight away the website started attracting considerable traffic volumes, which spurred Ranga into adding more businesses and developing the site in terms of design and functionality.

All this was achieved by Ranga on a part-time basis, but in August 2013 Ranga met Oisin at a “Meet a Co-Founder” event (big shout out to Kevin Loaec for organising that!). A few months later Ranga asked Oisin to join the team as commercial co-founder and by the end of the year a joint decision had been made to commit full-time to Localmint. The fact that in December 2013 Localmint had just shy of 1m unique users visits provided great encouragement that this was the right decision.

Localmint’s goal for 2014 is to develop the service we provide to both our users and our listed retailers to such an extent that we are unquestionably the leading provider of retail opening hours and location information in Ireland. Thereafter we will roll out our improved services across the UK and any other markets we choose to target.

Finally, we would love to hear any suggestions or feedback from users (e.g. what stores you would like listed) and retailers, because without your input and support we will not succeed.

Ranga and Oisin