HiStreets — Helping local businesses grow with technology

Why we built this

The food is just as good. The haircut is just as good. The difference is who has the technology.

A big chain can push an offer to hundreds of thousands of phones before lunch. The family restaurant down the road tapes a sign to the window and hopes someone walks past. That gap has nothing to do with quality. HiStreets is here to close it.

The giants already have

Enormous reach, built on tools

📱 Mobile apps & push notifications
📧 Email marketing to millions
🎯 Sophisticated ad targeting
⭐ Loyalty programmes & data teams

Local businesses have

Great products, no megaphone

📄 A handwritten note in the window
🗣️ Word of mouth, one street at a time
🤷 A brilliant offer no one nearby sees
⏳ No time, team or budget to compete

The people behind the shop signs

HiStreets isn't really about maps or AI. It's about people.

Behind every listing is someone who took a risk, or someone who just needs a bit of luck to go their way. These are the gaps we're trying to close. Hover over each one.

👩‍🍳

The café owner who cooks better than she markets

She put her savings into this place. The food is brilliant. But she's never built a website, and "digital marketing" sounds like a second full-time job she doesn't have time for.

→ Now she writes one line, and the whole neighbourhood sees today's offer.

🧑

The teenager looking for a first job

He's been scrolling the big job sites for weeks. Meanwhile a shop around the corner is desperate for weekend help and the only advert is a note in the window he never walks past.

→ Now he opens one app and finds work five minutes from home.

🤲

The volunteers cooking for people who need it

Every Friday they serve free hot meals. The trouble is the person half a mile away who's really struggling has no idea this help even exists.

→ Now that support shows up right beside everything else on the map.

Not to replace the high street. To strengthen it.
Not to make small shops act like giant corporations. Just to hand them the same tools.

Have a play

Don't just read about it. Poke it, tap it, break it.

This isn't a screenshot. Everything below actually works. Ask it a question in your own words, watch a rough note turn into a real post, spin up the neighbourhood score. Go on.

Ask HiStreets

Forget categories and filters. Say what you actually need, and HiStreets connects you to real local information.

Business Copilot

You provide the knowledge. HiStreets handles the technology. Type a rough note the way you'd say it out loud, and get back a clean post ready to publish.

The owner types

"20% off biryani tonight after 5"

HiStreets prepares

HiPulse

An explainable score from 0–100 showing how active your digital high street is right now. Not a mysterious AI number. Tap any signal to see what moves it.

HiPulse · E7

Local jobs, free to post

The Saturday café shift. The kitchen assistant. The first apprenticeship. Jobs that never reach LinkedIn or Indeed, now five minutes from home.

↑ Real-shaped local roles. Businesses post free · residents apply in-app.

Neighbourhood intelligence

Opportunity Gap turns unmet local need into local opportunity.

When lots of people are looking for something the market isn't providing enough of, that gap is a signal. HiStreets surfaces it privately, in aggregate, so a nearby business can respond.

🔎01 · Resident need

People search

Many locals look for affordable evening food in one part of the borough.

🕸️02 · Aggregated

Anonymous demand

Signals are combined privately. Never one person's search history.

⚡03 · Detected

Opportunity found

"Local opportunity detected." Demand is outpacing what's on offer.

✨04 · Business acts

Copilot responds

A relevant business is nudged; Copilot helps them post an offer.

🎉05 · Discovered

Residents win

The new offer appears on the map for the people who wanted it.

Privacy by design

Local intelligence, without becoming an ad-tracking machine.

HiStreets is not built around tracking people to sell ads. Trust is the product.

🙋

Browse freely

Residents use the public platform with no account needed.

🕵️

Searches stay private

Individual searches are never exposed to businesses.

📄

CVs protected

Applications go only to the relevant business owner.

✅

Verified, privately

Business verification evidence is kept confidential.

Everything in one place

One simple app. A surprising amount inside it.

HiStreets is deliberately easy to use. Under the hood, it quietly ties together maps, offers, jobs, community support and AI around one local ecosystem.

🗺️

Interactive borough map

Every business, offer, job and support point positioned on a neighbourhood map you can explore by touch.

🏷️

Local offers, made visible

Publish a promotion and the whole neighbourhood becomes your audience. No ad spend required.

💼

Free job posting

Advertise local roles for free and connect young talent with opportunity minutes from home.

🤝

Community & free meals

Support and free-meal initiatives sit right beside the shops and offers, because both are real life.

💬

Ask HiStreets AI

Describe what you need in plain words. It navigates real local information and never invents it.

✨

Business AI Copilot

Turn a rough note into a clean offer or job post. You stay in control and approve before it goes live.

✅

Register & claim

Verified business registration and claiming so genuine owners control their local presence.

🅿️

Parking intelligence

Can I park here now? Free or paid? How long? Coming when authoritative data can be shown safely.Coming soon

🏠

Property to rent

Local residents will be able to advertise available rooms and properties to rent, right on the map.Coming soon

The vision

Solve one borough properly. Then take what works to the next.

Not another giant national directory with millions of listings and no real local understanding. HiStreets goes deep before it goes wide.

Now · Live

Newham

Where it begins. Learn how residents use it and what businesses really need.

Another London borough

Adapt what works, keeping each place's local identity intact.

Then

Another community

Same underlying technology, new neighbourhood, local character preserved.

Later

Another city

Infrastructure built to support many communities, not one static website.

Borough, done right

£0

To post a job or offer

100%

Open source

PWA

Mobile-first, installable

Building HiStreets solo

The person behind it

Ahtashamul Haque

MSc Data Science · Software, AI & Machine Learning Engineer

Ahtashamul builds software for a living and works with AI and machine learning every day. He knows exactly how much a data team, a recommendation engine and a slick mobile app can do for a business, because he builds those things.

That's also what started to bother him. Walk down almost any high street and you'll see brilliant local businesses competing against companies with all of that firepower, armed with a paper sign in the window. The technology that quietly powers the giants was never built to help the barber, the grocer or the café on the corner.

"I kept thinking: the tools already exist. They're just pointed at the wrong people. So I started building HiStreets to point them at the high street instead."

So he brought it together into one place. The map, the offers, the local jobs, the community support. He added an AI assistant so residents can just say what they need, and a copilot so a shop owner who's never touched marketing can post an offer in one line. He built the neighbourhood intelligence, HiPulse and Opportunity Gap, so the data actually works for the community instead of mining it.

HiStreets is open source and built in the open, on purpose. Developers, designers, local businesses, community groups, councils and researchers are all welcome to dig into the project and shape where it goes. This is one person's vision, but it's meant to be built with people, not at them.

Python Machine Learning Mapping & Geo Applied AI Privacy-first data PWA

Get involved

One borough first. Then wherever it's needed next.

HiStreets is live in Newham and open to anyone who wants to help it grow. Try the app, poke around the code, or just send an email if the idea resonates.

Whether you run a local business, write code, organise in your community or work at a council, there's a way in.

Live application

app.histreets.uk

Open-source repo

github.com/zaid3/hi-streets-app

Get in touch

[email protected]

One connected community

Your high street already has more to offer than you realise.

Offers you've walked past. Jobs that never made it online. People building something from nothing, right on your doorstep. It's all been there the whole time. HiStreets just helps you see it.

Explore HiStreets View on GitHub

One borough. One digital high street. One connected community.