A date night app that decides, instead of handing you a list

Why a hundred ideas never become an evening out

Every list of date ideas has the same three holes. It does not know that you are in this town and not that one; it does not know that the place shut down in March, or that it closes at six on a Tuesday; and it does not know that one of you would rather walk than sit down. So the list gets saved, and saving is where it dies — in a folder of TikTok favourites, next to forty-six others.

We built the opposite. Not a longer list: a deck that reads real venues and dated events around you, and hands them over one at a time, with a decision to make. Keeping one is a gesture, not a bookmark.

How the deck picks

Real places, not ideas

Every card is a venue or a dated event that exists: read from Google Places and OpenStreetMap for places, OpenAgenda and Ticketmaster for events. Name, address, distance, rating, price, open or closed — and for an event, the next showing.

Your taste, read as an average

A swipe right adds a point to the fine type of the place — not to “restaurants” but to “wine bar”, “japanese”, “bouldering”. The deck reads those points as a shrunken average, so ten hearts do not weigh ten times one: liking izakayas never turns the whole deck Japanese.

Three stars, guaranteed

The three best-rated places in range are placed at cards one, nine and seventeen, whatever your taste says. A four-point-seven with two hundred ratings should never stay at the bottom of the pile.

One card in four from outside your taste

A quarter of the deck is drawn from what you have neither liked nor passed, as long as it holds up. It costs a little immediate agreement and it is the whole point: it is how you find the place you would never have searched for.

What we measured

A recommendation is easy to claim and hard to prove, so we wrote the ranking as a module with no network and no screen, and ran it on a hundred and twenty invented couples for a month of ten cards a day. Each invented couple had a hidden taste, including three “favourites” it did not know it had. Three runs: pure chance, our deck, and an oracle that cheats by reading the hidden taste.

A simulation, not a promise: invented couples are not real ones. It does tell us which of two rankings is better, which is what we wrote it for. Dropping the curious cards would lift agreement to 55% and drop the hidden favourites to 69% — that is the price we choose to pay.

In minutes, not kilometres

“Six point two kilometres” is a number you have to work out. “Fifteen minutes” is a decision you can make. So the map says minutes: on foot up to a kilometre and a half, through town beyond that, rounded to the nearest five and never under five. And the distance that counts is not yours — it is the distance of whichever of you is further away. A café next door to you and an hour from the other is not “next door”.

What it gives you tonight

Six families come up in the deck: somewhere to eat, something cultural, something outdoors, something sporty, an outing, a party. A chosen tag narrows it; “What shall we do?” on the map names one plan and one only — the nearest to both of you at once, with a near deadline coming first. The rest of the app takes it from there: the card you kept becomes a dated plan, and the evening you lived becomes a polaroid pinned where it happened.

Questions people ask