About Us

What’s on this page

Our team
Basic information
Timeline
Media resources
Press contact

Download Complete Press Kit (29.5 MB zip)

You are welcome to use our distinguishing features, especially our logo, but only in its unchanged form, when any prospective change of their form or content is subject to our previous written agreement. You aren’t allowed to send any unsolicited adverts (spam), which would content our distinguishing features. You always have to pay attention to avoid confusion with some other brand and not to damage our good name of the LocalDojo.com by a wrong application of our logo.

1. Our team

LocalDojo.com was created and it's maintained by a small team of experts in the heart of the Europe, in the Czech Republic.

Jan Kovařík
Founder & Designer

Tomáš Matonoha
Programmer

Petr Urbánek
Coder

Marek Rolný
SEO

Irena Opršalová
English Proofreading

Tomáš Fojtů
Dojos Editor

Petr Nespěšný
Dojos Editor

Jiří Konečný
Legal Advisor

2. Basic information

Our claim

Find the nearest Martial Arts Dojo.
最寄りの武術の道場を検索します (in Japanese)

LocalDojo in one sentence

It allows you to quickly find the nearest Martial Arts Dojo anywhere in the world.

How much does it costs

It’s completely free. You can use all features of LocalDojo without paying anything. No worries, you don’t pay with your personal information either, since all we need for registration is a valid email address and that's all.

Our typical user

It is either a Martial Arts student and a Dojo owner. With only one simple account, they can't only search or add Dojos, but also create their own profile page and be found by people they met on tatami. Also anybody can add a new Dojo (for free), so any Dojo can attract more students and be easily found among Martial Arts practitioners all over the world.

3. Timeline

2013

December

Jan is struggling to find any good Martial Arts Dojo in his hometown. It look, like there is no such thing like a global Martial Arts directory of any kind, only lists of Dojos in certain countries. So he starting to play with an idea for a website, where you can search for nearby Martial Arts Dojos, wherever you are.

2014

February

Jan came up with a name for his project and bought a domain name LocalDojo.com.

March

Jan got stuck in his Martial Arts practice and was forced to change his home Dojo. The new Dojo he found is causing a huge shift in his Martial Arts practice. As he continues to practice with a new sensei, he's becoming more and more convinced, that people would appreciate a better way how to look for a new Martial Arts Dojo.

2015

April

First wireframes were born. Nothing fancy yet, but it looks promising.

June

The design is finished and our team got its first member: Petr, a HTML/CSS coder, starting to create templates from my PSD files.

November

Jan asked his friend Jiří, an experienced lawyer, to prepare simple and user friendly Terms of Use for LocalDojo.com.

2016

February

Jan asked his friends and folks in his Dojo, if they were willing to help him to create a basic database of Dojos. Three of them are starting to work on it in their spare time, for a little financial reward.

April

As nobody from LocalDojo team is a native speaker, Jan asked Irena (an English teacher) for help and she is starting to help with proofreading of various texts on LocalDojo. LocalDojo core team now have 4 members.

May

LocalDojo want to use various microformats across the whole website, so Jan asked a fifth member of LocalDojo team, his friend Marek, and he is starting to help LocalDojo with better HTML/CSS structure to be more "robot" friendly.

October

Tomáš is joining LocalDojo team as a programmer. He's starting from a scratch and he promises to work on LocalDojo full time and get first live version ready by December. LocalDojo core team has 6 members now.

November

Jan created a blog on blog.localdojo.com where he plans to write and collect everything important in the world of Martial Arts.

December

Tomáš kept his word and LocalDojo is now in alpha version, ready for the first testing. LocalDojo is now starting with first user tests and those are a real eye-opener!

2016 is already coming to an end and it becomes clear, that the first beta version of LocalDojo will not be released sooner than in January 2017. Since there have been few major "UX" bugs emerging from the user still remained, it's ok.

2017

January

Petr and Tomáš are joining LocalDojo team, as new Dojo Editors. LocalDojo is about to launch the first public beta version.

February

Finally, LocalDojo has been launched and there is a lot of work ahead of us.

April

During this month, we started getting first few reviews and first few accounts were created. Since we didn't use any form of marketing, it's a great news that LocalDojo.com has its first users purely from organic search.

Also Peter, one of our Dojo editors, added almost a whole Poland Aikido asociations, so there is now a huge number of Aikido Dojos in Poland.

July

One of our external editors finished the adding of number of French Dojos. It's great to watch how is our database slowly growing.