Why local discovery is hard
Everyone has typed "best coffee near me" and scrolled past ten identical results. The strange thing is that the information exists. The places are there, the people who love them are there. The gap is not data. It is trust, context, and timing.
Most discovery products optimize for the average. They rank by review count, which rewards places that have been around long enough to accumulate reviews, which are rarely the places worth discovering. The interesting spot that opened three months ago loses to the chain on the corner every time.
Taste does not average well
The second problem is that "good" is not a property of a place. It is a relationship between a place and a person on a particular day. The bar that is perfect at 6pm with two friends is wrong at 9am alone. Ranking systems flatten all of that into a single number.
The goal is not to tell you the best place. It is to tell you the right place, for you, right now.
That is the bet behind what I'm building. More on that soon.