It was a Saturday night in October. Five of us in a group chat. Everyone showered, dressed, ready to go.
Then the scrolling started.
Yelp. Google Maps. Instagram. TikTok. "Best bars in the East Village." "New cocktail bars SoHo." Screenshots flying. Links nobody clicked. "What about this place?" "Eh, the reviews are mixed." "I’m not in the mood for that."
38 minutes later, nobody had decided anything.
Two people said "honestly I’m kind of tired now." One person put on sweatpants. We ordered Uber Eats and watched a movie. Five adults. Dressed and ready. Defeated by the search.
That wasn’t the first time. It happens constantly. And not just to us — we started asking around. Friends, coworkers, strangers at bars (when we actually made it to one). Same story every time. The desire is there. The options are there. The matching is broken.
We started tracking it. Informally at first, then obsessively. The average time someone spends trying to figure out where to go on a night out? 38 minutes across multiple apps. And a terrifying percentage of people just give up entirely.
Think about what that means. You were in the mood. You had the energy. You had people to go with. And the technology that was supposed to help you — the apps, the reviews, the lists — actually killed the night before it started.
The problem isn’t a lack of options. Manhattan has over 25,000 venues. Bars, restaurants, lounges, cafes, comedy clubs, live music, rooftops, speakeasies, food halls, pop-ups. The density is insane. There’s literally a perfect spot for every mood within walking distance at any given moment.
The problem is that nobody’s connecting your mood to those options.
Every existing platform asks the wrong questions. What cuisine? What price range? What neighborhood? How many stars? Those are filters, not answers. They narrow down a list. They don’t understand what you actually want.
What you actually want on a Tuesday night is completely different from what you want on a Saturday. What you want solo is different from what you want with six friends. What you want when you’re heartbroken is different from what you want when you’re celebrating.
Mood is the missing variable.
We couldn’t stop thinking about it. Every time we went out (or didn’t), we’d think: what if there was something that just asked you how you felt and told you where to go? Not a list. Not ten options. The answer.
So we started building it. Right here, over the holidays. No funding. No business plan. Just a laptop, a notebook full of scribbles, and the conviction that this problem — the one everyone experiences but nobody’s solving — is worth solving.
We don’t know exactly what this becomes yet. But we know the problem is real. We’ve lived it a hundred times. And we think the answer starts with one question nobody’s asking:
What is your mood right now?
— The Moodap™ Team