Why I built MN Fair Guide

I’m from there

Born and raised in Minnesota. I’ve been to the Great Minnesota Get-Together just about every year of my life, which puts me somewhere past thirty of them. I was in 4-H growing up, and that turns the fair from a day trip into a season: you’re working toward it for months, and then you’re there for days. I live in Colorado now. I still come back for it.

A few minutes above all of it

You get in a chair on the Sky Ride, you go up, and for a few minutes you’re above the whole thing, looking down at a sea of people eating food off sticks. Then you come down and go find something you’ve never eaten before. That’s the fair to me, more or less. Hang out, look down at all of it, eat something new.

4-H never misses

The food, the shows, the crafts, a building full of kids standing next to something they made. Whatever you think this fair is for, that building is the best argument for it. It’s our communities’ youth being wholesome in public for twelve days, and I don’t think there’s much else like it left.

The Midway is a blast too. That one needs no defending.

It is also very hard to get around

That’s the other half of the truth. The fairgrounds are 322 acres, and on a big Saturday there are a couple hundred thousand people on them. Everyone is holding a phone, and the network gives up somewhere around mid-morning. You go to look something up and you get a spinner. Meanwhile the thing you wanted was four blocks the other way.

I got tired of that. So I built the guide I kept wishing I had.

Built by someone who’s actually been

The whole directory and map ship inside the app. Search, pins and your saved list keep working with no signal at all, because that’s the state your phone is in for most of the day.

The rest of it comes from going. You’re eating six new things this year, so you want to know where the nearest restroom is, and I didn’t treat that as a joke feature. You’ve got a list of must-eats, so it’ll order them into a walk that doesn’t send you back and forth across the grounds. You want to know what’s on today and whether it’s about to rain on you. None of that came out of a brainstorm. It’s the stuff I’ve needed while standing there, for thirty years.

I didn’t want to ship something that was merely okay. There are enough of those. I wanted something you’d actually open while you’re inside the gates.

Free, unofficial, and honest about both

MN Fair Guide is free for fairgoers and will stay that way. No account, no sign-up, no trackers following you around the grounds. It is not the official State Fair app and I’d never pretend otherwise, so when tickets or official word matter the app sends you straight to mnstatefair.org.

Here’s how it pays for itself, stated plainly: any vendor can claim their booth and fill it in for free, forever. Vendors who want more visibility can also buy a clearly-labelled Featured placement. That’s the only money in this, and it comes from businesses, never from you.

And for the people behind the windows

A vendor can claim their booth, drop a pin on their exact spot, put up photos and a menu, and tag themselves by what people actually search for. It shows up in the app right away. Most of these are family operations that have been working the same corner for decades, and a lot of them had no listing worth the name. Fixing that felt like the least I could do.

Why I keep at it

The Get-Together matters to this state in a way that’s hard to explain to people who didn’t grow up with it. I’d like it to keep mattering. This is a small way to give something back to it: make a big, crowded, wonderful thing a little easier to be inside of.

If you find something wrong, or you’ve got an idea, tell me. I read all of it.

— Keith