Building Ericeira Review in Public — Log 01

Log 01 · April 2026. This is the first entry in a build-in-public series on Ericeira Review. New logs land roughly every 4–6 weeks as the site grows. Log 02 preview below.

I soft-launched ericeirareview.com at the end of February 2026 with a handful of friends and local beta reviewers. The first review hit the database on 25 February 2026. The site went fully public on 30 March 2026 — the first pageview logged at 14:48 UTC, an organic Google hit from Iceland. That makes this a 19-day-old public site at time of writing. The numbers: 421 unique visitors, 1,256 pageviews, 20 countries, 46 five-star reviews, 118 Instagram referrals. All from the database, no rounding up.

This is the build-in-public log. The why, the what, the stack, the early numbers, the mistakes. If you're thinking about building a local guide — or you just want to see what shipping something slow and real looks like from the inside — this is for you. I'll publish another log when there's something meaningfully different to report.

Why I Built It

Ericeira is a UNESCO World Surfing Reserve about forty-five minutes north of Lisbon. In 2025, the town crossed into "small media darling" territory — thousand-plus remote workers, nomads, surfers, indie founders, a real ecosystem. I wrote more about that scene in the honest Portugal freelancer guide.

And yet — there wasn't a good guide to it.

What existed was mostly noise. A few tourist sites translated badly from Portuguese. Dozens of listicles written by people who spent a weekend and decided to tell the internet about it. Facebook groups with gold inside that nobody outside could find. The deep local knowledge — which restaurant does the best prego no pão at midnight, which beach is working on a north swell, which teacher actually speaks English with the patience of a saint — lived in WhatsApp voice notes and at the coffee shop.

I wanted a place that looked like the town deserves: editorial, honest, opinionated, and written by someone actually here. Not a listicle factory. Not a review farm. A guide.

What It Is Today

Ericeira Review is closer to a Yelp-for-this-town than a blog. What's live today:

• Spots — the seed directory: restaurants, cafés, surf schools, shops, clinics, studios. Over 1,600 places indexed, each with structured info (hours, tags, location, phone) plus the editorial "is this actually worth going?" layer.
• Categories, tags, locations — browse by cuisine, vibe, neighbourhood, or any of 125 tags. The point is to answer real intent queries — "best brunch Ericeira open Sunday" — not just list names.
• Reviews — user-submitted, with upvotes, useful-counts, and replies from listing owners. Reviewers earn points on the leaderboard and unlock rewards tied to real local perks.
• People — profiles of locals and long-stays doing interesting things: surf shapers, chefs, founders, photographers. Built on the same profile system reviewers use.
• For business — business owners can claim a listing and maintain their own info, reply to reviews, and get light analytics. Verified badge once identity is confirmed.
• Blog — long-form editorial when a topic deserves more than a listing. Guides, neighbourhood deep-dives, interviews.
• Sunday note — one short email a week summarising what's new on the site and the week ahead locally. Where the real reader relationships form.

The tone is intentionally the opposite of what a tourism board would publish. Specific. A little opinionated. Sometimes critical. Always honest about what works and what doesn't.

The Stack (For Fellow Builders)

If you've read my other posts you'll recognise the pattern — I optimise for shipping, not for architectural perfection. The stack is boring on purpose.

• Nuxt 4 for the frontend. Server-rendered, type-safe, Vite-fast. Same core stack as daviddacruz.dev because muscle memory matters when you're running two sites.
• Supabase for the database and auth. Postgres, row-level security, built-in auth for reviewer accounts and business claims. Forty-odd tables, including ranking views, review aggregates, and funnel analytics materialised for speed.
• Google Places for listing hydration — hours, phone, coordinates. The editorial layer on top is what makes it different from a raw Places scrape.
• Cloudflare Images for photography at small scale. Resize-on-demand, good enough CDN, simple billing.
• Tailwind CSS for styling. Editorial type (Inter body + Space Grotesk display — same pairing as daviddacruz.dev, because consistency).
• Sentry wired in from day one. Local-guide sites die silently — I want to see every 500 the moment it happens.

The whole thing is a monorepo in my head — different domain, same muscle memory. When I ship a feature on daviddacruz.dev I can usually port the shape of it here in an afternoon, even when the underlying database differs.

The deliberate choices: no WordPress, no Contentful, no generic review-site template. The structured data lives in Postgres where it can power filters, rankings, and analytics. Editorial posts live as markdown in the repo. The friction is the point — there's no "easy publish" button tempting me to fill the feed with noise.

The First Month: Numbers

These numbers are live — pulled from the Ericeira Review production database at request time and cached for an hour. They'll update themselves as the site grows, which is the whole point of a build-in-public log. No screenshot at launch time that quietly becomes fiction by Log 04.

The site went from zero to these figures between 25 February 2026 (first seeded review) and 17 April 2026 (this export). The first three weeks were quiet seeding; the public phase started 30 March.

The Simple Analytics export, visualised

The numbers below read straight from the Simple Analytics datapoints feed — daily traffic, country mix, device split, browsers, top pages, and acquisition channels across the first 19 days live. The data was exported on 17 April 2026 and baked into this post, so the charts stay stable even as the live site's stats keep moving:

The one-line summary reading those charts: Portugal carries 86% of pageviews, mobile carries 82% of sessions, and one Instagram post on 6 April produced the only traffic spike — 356 pageviews in a single day. The rest is steady local acquisition through direct and Instagram, exactly the profile you'd want for a town-scale guide.

For reference, here's the tabular version for copy-paste:

The honest reading: the directory is dense (1,600+ listings), the review layer is growing fast (46 reviews in 7 weeks, with 968 useful votes — that's genuine engagement, not padding), and Instagram is already the #2 traffic source at 19 days in. The 80 unprompted visits to /add-listing and /claim were the most surprising signal — businesses found the site before I'd reached out to any of them.

Instagram as the Door

Instagram is the first discovery surface for a town like this. Tourists check it before they check Google. Locals tag their own stuff there first. So while the site is the compound-interest asset, @ericeirareview on Instagram is the daily door — where cold discovery happens and where the site's voice lives before people commit to the newsletter.

The positioning, straight from the bio on the account:

The local guide Ericeira deserves. Built by one. Real reviews. No ads. Earn points for every review.

That third line — earn points for every review — is the hook that differentiates this from yet-another-Instagram-local-account. The points system on ericeirareview.com/rewards exists in the database from day one, so every Instagram post can (in theory) pull someone toward the site, toward a review, toward points, toward coming back.

In theory.

In practice, the data is already proving the loop works — at least partially. In the first 19 days, Instagram sent 118 tracked referrals to the site, making it the #2 traffic source behind direct. A single post on 6 April 2026 drove 8 new reviews in one day and a 356-pageview spike the same day — the biggest single-day number of the launch window. The Apr 1–7 week pulled 834 pageviews off the back of that post. One post, no ads, no boosting. The Starseed Coffee Roastery spot drove 202 total visits from five countries (PT, AT, US, GB, HR) — a spot listing, not editorial long-form.

I still don't have a posting cadence. No content calendar, no reels strategy. The account updates when I genuinely want to send someone to a place. That's the truth of one-person media at month one.

The honest operating principle I've landed on: Instagram is not the job, the site is. Every hour I spend chasing the algorithm is an hour not writing a review, not photographing a spot, not fixing the search experience. For a local guide, the site compounds; Instagram resets to zero every time the algorithm sneezes. But the 6 April spike showed that even one well-placed post on a high-interest spot pulls people in, through the review flow, and into the points system. The loop closes faster than I expected.

What I'll report in Log 02: whether that holds at month two, the first business to claim its listing organically (already in the queue), and the first partnership offer I turned down.

What I've Learned

One month in, a handful of things I didn't expect before I started.

Local SEO is a different game. On the main daviddacruz.dev site, I compete for "fractional CTO Portugal" against hundreds of global players. On Ericeira Review, I compete against Tripadvisor and a handful of sleepy local directories. The bar is lower, but the reward is also more defensible — once you're the default, you stay the default. Technical SEO that compounds applies here, just more intensively on structured data and page-speed basics.

Photography moves the needle more than writing. I knew this intellectually. Living it is different. A review with a good photo of the place gets 3-4× the read-through of one without. I've rebuilt my photography setup twice already. Still not where I want it.

Newsletter >> social. I spent the first two months posting on Instagram. It was a waste. The Sunday note has a 48% open rate and every issue drives real clicks to the site. Social is discovery; email is relationship. I now publish to Instagram as an afterthought and treat the Sunday note as the primary channel.

Consistency is the only real strategy. One review a week since soft launch — that's what got the site to where it is in a month. Not a viral post. Not a hack. Not an AI content factory. Just showing up.

Moderation is the hardest unsexy job. Once people know you're the local guide, the DMs start. Businesses asking to be reviewed. Other businesses asking their competitors to be un-reviewed. PR people pitching new spots that aren't even open yet. I had to write a simple editorial policy early because without one you get pulled in a hundred directions that all make the site worse.

What's Next · Log 02 Preview

The honest roadmap for the next 4–6 weeks — which is what Log 02 will report against:

• Events surface. The schema is in place but not yet populated. Weekly curated events — surf contests, markets, live music, the quiet stuff Instagram misses — is the next visible addition.
• A better map experience. Spots pinned on a real map, filterable by what's open now, tagged by surf conditions, family-friendliness, vibe. The list-view works, but a map is what people actually want.
• Deeper review coverage. 1,600 listings with 46 reviews is directory-heavy, signal-light. The focus is on rewarding reviewers (points and rewards are already wired), seeding a few dozen high-quality reviews myself on landmark spots, and onboarding the early power users.
• Business onboarding. The claim flow works, but barely anyone knows. A short campaign through Ericeira business WhatsApp groups should trigger the first wave of verified claims.
• Better seasonal coverage. Ericeira has two very different rhythms (quiet winter vs packed summer). The site needs to reflect that more explicitly — what's worth doing in February is different from August.
• Partnerships with Ericeira businesses and coworking spaces to sponsor specific columns without compromising editorial independence. Early conversations suggest this is achievable if done slowly and transparently.

Log 02 will come out when at least three of those have shipped and there's something honest to say about whether they worked.

The one thing I won't do: chase national or international audiences. This is a guide to Ericeira, for people who live here or are about to spend real time here. The moment I try to serve everyone, I stop serving the people the site exists for.

Why It Lives Alongside daviddacruz.dev

A fair question: why run two sites? Why not just fold Ericeira Review into a /ericeira section of daviddacruz.dev?

Three reasons.

Different audiences. Indyshuman readers are founders, operators, and builders looking for technical depth. Ericeira Review readers are people planning a move, looking for dinner, or wondering if a swell is worth driving for. The content voice and the reader intent are completely different. Merging them would dilute both.

Different rhythms. Indyshuman ships when I have something to say, typically once a month. Ericeira Review ships weekly because local information decays fast. Running them as separate products means neither pace leaks into the other.

It's a real product. Ericeira Review is something I'd like to scale in a way daviddacruz.dev never will — local guides can plausibly support a one-person team for a long time, and the reps I'm getting building it are teaching me things that flow back into my consulting work for founders building their own product companies. The building-in-public commitment is genuine. I want to see where it goes.

If you're building something local, slow, and real — come say hi. I'll trade notes.

The full technical breakdown — stack decisions, first-month metrics, and what the build taught me about local SEO — is in the Ericeira Review case study →

If you want to see the site, it lives at ericeirareview.com. If you want the Sunday note, you can subscribe there directly. If you want to ping me about how you'd do it differently, or pitch a spot you think deserves a review — the contact page is open.

If this gave you a "that's what I need for my product" itch — Live in a Day is the same shipping discipline at $490, one day, live on your domain by evening.