During Lockdown 1.0 in India, I along with my friends Dipanshu & Vivekanand created a progressive web app to help people. It all started with a simple idea of giving users option to register a business and vote/report if the business is open or close so that other users can check about a particular shop’s status before going out and without calling the owner (if they have the owner’s number!).

The light bulb moment 💡

We started with a simple resolution to a problem a lot of us were facing at that time. In some areas, some shops wre closed completely and some shops were opening with a schedule. Sometimes you go a long way to find that the shop is closed. We wanted to resolve this problem. This was not limited to Lockdown era only and we wanted it to work after Lockdown as well as it happens with people everytime. We wanted to give users a platform where anybody can register a shop and and business owner or customer can vote/report/change status of the shop so others can check the status before stepping out of their home. So, we created https://www.whatisopen.in.

What’s big deal about this

What is Open Today (or WIOT) is a free platform for business owners and customers where business owner’s can register their business for free and can show the status of their business (ie. whether it is open or closed) and customers need not to call the business owner to check the shop’s status

What Is Open Today also provides business owners a free website with a working contact form. We will soon be adding a storefront option for business website. Once enabled, business owner’s can add and show their product on their website and customer’s can reach them through the contact form directly.

Final Thoughts

So we started with a simple idea and made a platform which in time may help millions of small to mid level business owners get their first online presence and that too for free. We are trying to keep What Is Open Today very simple and it’s flow very easy to understand.

I have created a few videos for folks to understand how WIOT works. Me and my team is working on improving the implementation and adding new feature almost every week. We would love to have your feedback on how we are doing and what can be improved or added, you can reach us using this contact form on the website itself. 😄