Solving Real Problems: Seoul Trash Map & AI Menu Translator

Building for the Real World (and the Real Pains)

As Marc you continues to grow, I wanted to step away from purely digital tools (like our brutally honest Idea Roaster or the Tower Obby game) and build something that solves a physical, real-world problem.

If you've ever visited Seoul as a foreigner, you've likely encountered two profound cultural shocks:

1. The Disappearing Trash Can Mystery: You finish your iced Americano, and then you carry the empty cup for 45 minutes because there are no trash cans anywhere.
2. The "What am I eating?" Dilemma: You sit down at a traditional, authentic no-po (old local restaurant). The menu is only in Korean. Google Translate says the signature dish is "Grandma's Bone Soup." You are terrified.

To solve this, I spent the weekend vibe-coding two brand new MVPs specifically targeted at the growing expat and tourist community in Seoul.

🗑️ Find My Trash Can in Seoul

It turns out that Seoul's lack of street bins is a well-known historical quirk (dating back to a pay-as-you-throw trash policy).

To help travelers out, I built an interactive, mobile-friendly Trash Map. It instantly locates you and points you to the nearest legal public trash bin.

(Developer Note: The Seoul Open Data API doesn't actually provide live coordinates for every single bin—so we generated a highly representative 3,000-pin localized mapping covering major subway stations and tourist hotspots like Hongdae, Itaewon, and Gangnam to give you the most likely drop-off points).

🍲 Seoul Menu Translator (The 'Vibe' Check)

Literal translation apps fail spectacularly in Korea because Korean food names are often poetic or highly abbreviated.

So, I built an AI Menu Translator powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o-mini Vision model. You just snap a photo of the physical menu, and the AI doesn't just translate the words—it gives you the vibe. It tells you:

• What the dish actually is.
• How spicy it is on a realistic scale.
• What you should drink with it (Soju vs. Makgeolli).
• Any cultural warnings (e.g., "This has a very chewy cartilage texture").

We even built in special React error boundaries and meta tags to ensure that mobile browsers' auto-translate extensions don't crash the app while the AI is doing its magic.

Try them out for free

Both tools are live right now on the Marc you platform. No signup required.

• Check out the tools from our main navigation bar.
• Share them with anyone visiting Korea!

Building tools that solve immediate constraints is incredibly rewarding. Next up: The Product Hunt Launch. Stay tuned!