Vision¶
Tomoda is the app for spontaneous, in-person life with the people you already like. It exists because the internet has gotten extraordinarily good at connecting strangers and extraordinarily bad at helping friends actually meet up. The shape of the experience is a warm, location-aware surface — a map of your friends, a list of plans you can join in the next few hours, ephemeral moments from places you both care about — engineered to get you off your phone and into a room with people you know.
The one-paragraph manifesto¶
Most "social" software is optimised for stranger-to-stranger reach, infinite scroll, and parasocial engagement metrics. The cost of that optimisation is that your group chat with the four people you'd actually grab dinner with is buried under a hundred takes from people you don't know. Tomoda inverts the default. The home screen is a map of your friends, your plans, and the places that matter to you. Discovery exists, but it is bounded — radii, friends-of-friends, the public surface of an event you can actually attend — not a recommendation engine racing for your attention. We do not sell ads. We do not optimise for session length. We build for the moment someone closes the app and walks out the door.
What the experience looks like¶
- You open the app and you see where your friends are, not what they posted three days ago.
- An event is a plan to be somewhere together — start time, end time, place, capacity. It exists for hours, not for archive value.
- A moment is an ephemeral photo from a place — the default lifetime is 24 hours, the default audience is friends-only.
- A chat is either a thread inside an event, a DM with one person, or a small group room you started for one purpose. Conversations can disappear by design.
- Discovery is a map — you zoom to see friends, events you can join, and places worth going. It is not a feed.
What we are not¶
| We are not… | Because… |
|---|---|
| A feed | The thing we want to win is your plans, not your attention. |
| A dating app | The graph starts with people you already know. |
| A check-in / leaderboard product | Showing up is the reward; we don't gamify it heavily. |
| A creator platform | The unit of content is a moment with three friends, not a post with three thousand viewers. |
| An advertising business | We don't sell your location, your friend graph, or your attention. |
What we are optimising for¶
- Warmth over slickness. The UI is a quiet frame around content the user actually cares about. See Brand.
- Bounded over infinite. Every surface has a horizon — a radius, a zoom tier, a friends-only visibility default.
- Ephemerality over permanence. Most things expire. Events archive, moments disappear, disappearing-messages are first-class. Permanence is opt-in.
- In-person over in-app. Success is measured by the time the user is not in the app, in a place we helped them get to.