Here's the full version with that opener: It's a weird time to feel bored. We've got more apps telling us what's around us than ever before, and somehow deciding what to do with a free afternoon only got harder. You open Google Maps and get 10,000 unranked pins. You open Tripadvisor and get the same "Top 10" list every other tourist is reading that week. None of it knows anything about you. It just hands you more to sort through yourself, which is the opposite of what you actually wanted. So Zolo started from a pretty simple, stubborn idea: your interests, your budget, your personality should actually change what gets shown to you, and it should tell you why it picked something, not just slap a star rating on it and call that personalization. The part I'm probably proudest of isn't even a feature, it's a decision I made partway through. I'd built out an early version with a mix of real places and some placeholder demo listings just to fill things out, and at some point it started bothering me. It didn't feel honest, even in a small way. So I ripped it all out and rebuilt on 100% real, live data. Every place on Zolo is a real place with a real photo of that exact place, no exceptions, even though it meant losing some of the curated storytelling I'd been proud of. That one call ended up shaping a lot of what came after. Once you commit to only showing what's real, you end up caring a lot more about whether the personalization is actually working, not just looking like it is. So a lot of the later work went into making sure the system genuinely learns from what you save or skip, instead of pretending to. Still very much building this in public, and I'd love to hear what people think, especially if "too many options, not enough time to sort them" is a feeling you know.

Zolo

Your world, rediscovered.

Your world, rediscovered.