What's Good Scaled to 300k Monthly Visits With a 3-Person Team

ABOUT

Mobile-First Platform for Discovering Local Events

What’s Good, a hyper-local U.S. event and entertainment discovery service startup, uses Cloudinary to help it punch above its weight to offer a competitive, mobile-first app distinguished by compelling visuals. Capabilities like Cloudinary’s AI-powered Generative Fill, which analyzes images and fills new areas with matching background imagery to match the original style and setting, have been a major help in streamlining the handling of the extensive client and user-generated content (UGC) it needs to upload and quickly customize.

THE CHALLENGE

Small Team, Big Vision

St. Petersburg, Florida is a vibrant city with a lot going on for young people. The problem that former pharma tech developer Dustin Rowe and his friends identified: Going out meant hitting the same bar trivia spot, the same familiar beach — too much rinse and repeat.

After one too many concert reels on Instagram and wondering how they missed out, they asked: “What if we built a web service that turned the social secretary job over to AI and used a combination of screen scraping and algorithms to surface lots of options not just for us, but for others in the area?” They also wanted to differentiate themselves by building a browser-based site that looked and felt like a mobile app experience but didn’t require the time and storage of a download.

The challenge was stark: Build and scale a visual-first event platform with a three-person team. With picture-perfect images critical to the experience and volume growing daily, manual image editing was already unsustainable, and becoming impossible.

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Scalable, AI-Powered Image Handling

Inspired by visual-first platforms like Instagram, the team had a good sense of what types of tech they needed but struggled to find the right solution initially. “At first, everything seemed like it was built for huge enterprises; it was really tough to get started,” comments Rowe.

Just a few months in, and with a high volume of images that needed to be uploaded into the new site, Rowe sought the advice of founders within his extended network. Several of them recommended Cloudinary’s image and video API platform, which offered exactly what his team needed.

“It was pretty clear that what we started out with wouldn’t scale, but very fortunately after trialling several alternatives I learned about Cloudinary, which came bundled with lots of cool image transformation tools and also has a really great API. Those were very strong selling points to me.”

Capabilities like Generative Fill let the team turn messy, mismatched user-generated content (UGC) into consistently sized, on-brand visuals for mobile in seconds. Cloudinary’s generative AI capabilities are powered by AWS and leverage Amazon Bedrock to access LLMs, such as Nova and Claude, to enable the team to manage their image and video assets at scale.

Cloudinary’s support, however, was the icing on the cake, as Rowe explains: “Wherever we run into technical problems, we get a very quick, helpful response. Along with its unique functionality, this really sets Cloudinary apart from big enterprise software providers, where a company our size is not a high priority.”

THE RESULTS

Scaling New Heights

Three years after adopting Cloudinary, What’s Good is doing great and growing fast. It launched the first checkwhatsgood.com site in Wilmington, NC, where co-founder Megan Rowe is an established local influencer, championing local businesses on Instagram and TikTok. Today, the popular site attracts more than 300,000 visits per month. Checkwhatsgood for St. Petersburg, Florida followed, a popular destination for discovering beachfront events, happy hour promotions, family-friendly exhibits and cultural attractions.

Key to What’s Good’s success, according to Dustin, is providing those engaging, mobile-first visual experiences to attract visitors, keep them involved, and coming back for more. For all its services, What’s Good relies on Cloudinary to manage a vast and varied array of visual content, including ads, partner-supplied video, related image sets (critical for DMOs), and, most importantly, the high volume of UGC that makes visitors feel part of a communal experience.

Next up, What’s Good is pivoting to offer a B2B service that allows city tourism and DMOs to build local sites on its platform to attract visitors and revenue. This expansion is made easier thanks to Cloudinary’s APIs. For example, What’s Good can easily link the data and images in its systems to top tourist destinations like Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, which also uses Cloudinary.

But perhaps the greatest advantage that What’s Good gained from Cloudinary was empowering a small team to realize their vision for a mobile-first, visually rich, FOMO-busting discovery service. Then help them scale it to new heights, without skipping a beat.