i’ve been circling this problem for longer than Momentra has existed. one part of that story i almost never talk about is Salt & Green. i built it as a small local events guide for the Upper Valley, where i live. admittedly, i always thought Salt & Green was the precursor to a bigger plan. but first principles took the lead, so i started with: i wanted to know what was happening around me, and i wanted the information to be useful enough that someone could actually decide whether to go. that meant building a system for finding the event, checking the date, checking the time, finding the right link, figuring out who was hosting it, whether kids could go, what it cost, where it actually was, and filling in whatever was missing. then doing it again for the next event. and the next one. eventually i realized checking so many places, was the problem to solve for. so, my first technical answer was: “Website → Events - Turn any website into clean, reliable event data” a little Apify tool i launched here on Product Hunt. give it a website, it find the events on it. at that point i thought the hard problem was scraping. oh, how things have changed. over the last year i’ve talked to a lot of people about this. people maintaining community calendars by hand. people building local discovery products. publishers. destination marketers. event organizers. engineers. people at companies working on the infrastructure around destinations and events. i volunteered time around Vermont Open Farm Week, helping promote local farm events onto statewide tourism and agriculture channels. i’ve talked with industry titans, the newer startups still trying to break into the titan's market, people building what might become the new social, and a lot of people whose names will never appear on a Momentra customer list. most of those conversations weren’t sales calls. they were quiet community building. i was trying to understand why this work is still so hard. hearing it from the people who host the events as much as the people who post the events. and the more i’ve listened and built, the less i think scraping is the interesting part. getting information off a page is relatively straightforward. i mean... its foundational, but it's not the differentiation. the harder questions come afterward. who is actually hosting the event? is the host the same organization as the venue? are two listings describing the same event? if trusted sources disagree, which information is more believable? which one is newer? who is actually responsible for keeping the information correct? and eventually: do you have enough evidence to stop checking behind the system? that progression is basically how i got to Momentra. Salt & Green taught me the problem as someone trying to make a useful calendar. Website Events taught me the extraction problem. talking to people doing this work taught me how much larger the problem actually is. Momentra is where i’m trying to solve what comes after extraction. today that means finding events across trusted organizations, resolving identities, reconciling conflicting information, tracking provenance and changes, and maintaining structured event records that other products can use through an API. my thinking has moved roughly like this: finding → scraping → identity → presence → responsibility → recency → believability i’m figuring out what people will actually pay for, and what deserves to become a company rather than just an interesting technical problem. but one thing i feel more certain about than when i started is that i don’t want Momentra to just be another event scraping tool. i know other people are building those now. some of you have launched local event discovery apps. some have rebuilt community calendars. some are newly responsible for a destination or region and trying to do more with a budget and staff that are already stretched. i’m here for all of that. i want Momentra to become a set of tools that removes as much of this repetitive work as we reasonably can without asking for more of your limited time and attention. but i also want something bigger around the work itself: a community where the people responsible for public event information can actually talk to one another about what works, what doesn’t, what should be standardized, what should remain human judgment, and what trustworthy public event infrastructure should look like. because i increasingly think of this work as civic responsibility. not because calendars are especially glamorous. because knowing what is happening, where, when, and according to whom is part of how the internet understands the physical world. the future of AI will have many ways of contextualizing the world. and as more software and AI starts answering questions about where we should go, what we should do, and what is happening around us, i think getting that underlying information right, impacts communities in positive ways. i don’t have all the answers here. that is partly why i’m launching Momentra this way. i want to hear from the people who have been quietly dealing with this problem too. what do you think trustworthy public event data infrastructure actually needs to get right? and maybe the harder question: what would have to be true before you trusted it enough to stop checking behind it? p.s. i know that was a lot. this is probably my one chance to be completely off the cuff about how i got here, so i’m letting the Product Hunt community have the whole thing. earlier experiment, for context: https://www.producthunt.com/p/ap...

Momentra

Event data infrastructure for community calendars

Event data infrastructure for community calendars