Summary after filling in the MVP Canvas workbook (Google Doc):

Project Vision

  • What & Who: An interactive San Diego map by zip code or neighborhood showing local tap water TDS, calcium, and magnesium levels for specialty tea drinkers like Tea-Brewer Tim.

  • How It Works: Ingests municipal PDF reports via a Python data pipeline into a backend database, surfacing aesthetic mineral profiles during 2007-2025 on an interactive frontend.

Planning your MVP

  1. 1.

    Problem: Municipal water reports are fragmented, published as static annual PDFs, and focus almost exclusively on safety rather than aesthetic mineral composition for brewing.

  2. 2.

    Ideal Customer Profile (ICP):

    1. 1.

      Tea-Brewer Tim is a San Diego tea enthusiast who brews premium, delicate teas and needs precise mineral data to avoid muted flavors caused by high calcium.

  3. 3.

    Core Value Proposition: A single open-data dashboard to look up local water hardness/TDS, enabling home and traveling tea brewers to optimize their brewing water chemistry.

  4. 4.

    MVP Features:

    • Localized interactive San Diego map with TDS/Calcium visual overlays and timeline graph.

    • Backend pipeline that extracts and normalizes municipal PDF report data.

    • (Stretch goal) User-submitted TDS meter logging.

And because I also want to show things that didn't make it in (but may sneak in 🤫):

🚀 Future Vision & Dream Roadmap

These are the ambitious features saved for future iterations once the core MVP is validated and in users' hands:

  • Crowdsourced User Readings: A contribution feature allowing Tim and other users to submit their own TDS pen readings and log real-time data against official city reports.

  • Source Water Tracing: Tracking water back to its origins (e.g., imported aqueducts vs. local reservoirs) to display pre-treatment vs. post-treatment aesthetic mineral profiles.

  • National / Multi-City Expansion: Scaling the pipeline beyond San Diego to map choropleth data across major cities nationwide.

  • Crowdsourced Research & Community Insights: Enabling users to contribute research on local water sources, treatment methods, and neighborhood-level water chemistry notes.

  • WQX Data Integration: Automated integration with official EPA Water Quality Exchange (WQX) environmental streams to pull ambient mineral data automatically.