Pleven Guide

Overview

Pleven Guide is a free, independent guide for the thousands of international students at Medical University – Pleven — doctors, pharmacies, housing, paperwork, food, transport, and everything else a new arrival needs, in English and in one place. It's our own product: conceived, designed, built, and run entirely by our studio.

The challenge

Students arrive from India, Pakistan, Italy, Greece, the UK, Germany, and dozens of other countries. Many don't read Cyrillic and know nobody in the city. The information they need already existed — scattered across Facebook groups, Bulgarian-only municipal websites, and the memories of students a year ahead. The challenge was to turn it into something trustworthy and fast to use on a phone, often in a stressful moment: which pharmacy is open at 22:30, where to find an English-speaking dentist, how to renew a residence permit.

What we built

We designed and built the whole product in about two months over summer 2026 — information architecture, brand, UI, content, and engineering. The site is generated from structured data: every place is a record with category, opening hours, price level, coordinates, and Google rating, and that single source produces 160+ pages. Listings are ranked by a weighted score that balances rating against review count, and can be re-sorted by distance from the university or from the visitor's own location. Ratings are refreshed from Google Maps by a script we run on demand. Instant on-site search, an emergency page, long-form guides, and LocalBusiness schema on every listing complete the picture.

Results

• Indexed by Google and receiving organic search traffic within weeks of launch
• Already recommended by ChatGPT — AI assistants send visitors straight to the site
• Shared organically in student communities on Instagram and Facebook