Kept Plans
Every plan starts in a group chat and most of them end there. Six people agree it would be great, nobody names a day, and the thread dies. The missing piece is not another calendar or another chat, it is the moment somebody says out loud that they are actually going.
The constraintThe commitment has to cost enough to mean something and never feel like a charge, and a platform for meeting strangers has to be safe by its structure rather than by a safety page.
Founder, product designer and engineer. The commitment and the hold, check-in, clubs, right now, memories, discovery, the Kept rate, the host and venue sides and their economics, the safety model, the city coverage, and the public site.
- 160 activities in 19 groups
- 10 dollar hold, released on check-in
- 10% platform fee, two dollar minimum
- 685 cities across the US
- 01The commitment: a ten dollar hold, released on check-in, never charged for showing up
- 02Check-in in one tap, which is the moment the whole product turns on
- 03Right now: instant plans, and a button for when you are simply bored
- 04Clubs: the plans that repeat, with the people who keep showing up to them
- 05Memories, kept: a shared album only for the people who were there, the best photos first, and one year ago today
- 06People: discovery by the thing you both want to do, not by a profile
- 07The Kept rate: the share of plans you actually kept, which earns you smaller holds
- 08Nineteen groups and a hundred and sixty activities, from coffee to camping
- 09Hosting: the host sets the fee and is paid out after the plan, on a ten per cent platform fee with a two dollar minimum, and the split is shown before anybody joins
- 10Safety: public venues for new hosts, the address only to those who joined,
- 11a one-tap safety button, eighteen and over, ID checks on the plans that need them
- 12Cancel a day ahead and the whole hold comes back; inside a day, half of it stays
- 13Open in six hundred and eighty-five cities across the United States, each one covering the towns around it
Stop saying we should hang out. Make the plan.
Every plan starts in a group chat, and most of them end there. Six people agree that it would be great, nobody names a day, and the thread dies. The missing piece is not another calendar or another chat. It is the moment somebody says out loud that they are actually going.
So that moment is the product. A time, a place, a group, and a ten dollar hold that says you mean it. It is a hold rather than a charge: it shows as pending, no money moves, and it is released the moment you check in with one tap. Nobody is ever charged for showing up. A little skin in the game changes the whole plan, and it changes it for everyone else on the plan too, which is the real point.
Around the commitment sit the parts that make a plan worth keeping. Clubs, for the things that repeat and the people who keep coming to them. Right now, for when the plan is tonight or the honest answer is that you are bored. Memories, a shared album that belongs to the people who were actually there, because the plan ends and the good parts should not. Discovery works by the thing you both want to do rather than by browsing people, which is a deliberate line: this is not a dating app and not a people browser. There are no reviews of people either, on purpose. The Kept rate records whether somebody turned up, and nothing else about them.
Safety is structural rather than a page. New hosts start in public venues, the exact address goes only to people who joined, every plan carries a one-tap safety button, it is eighteen and over with ID checks on the plans that need them, and a person reads every report. Joining is free and the hold is refundable. It is open in six hundred and eighty-five cities across the United States, and each one covers the towns around it.