Hi there, and welcome to North. 👋

We have a confession to make—we’re big “place” nerds.

We love a coffee shop that makes the perfect half-caf cappuccino and just-spicy-enough breakfast burrito. We obsess over thoughtful tiny details of our favorite boutique hotels. And we search for the perfect dinner spot for so long that they all close by the time we choose.

So, we made “a place for our places”.

Frankly, we tried not to build this. But we used everything else—pins on maps, long notes docs, meticulous (and tedious) spreadsheets—none of them worked.

We want something fast and easy. Something that helps us remember both new restaurants in our hometown and places to see during our travels.

When friends ask us for recs in Tokyo, we want a lightning-fast way to send them our top picks from our recent visit.

We want to jot down notes on what we liked (and what we didn’t), without our thoughts being posted for the whole internet to see.

We like recs for new places to check out, but we’re wary of trusting the subjective opinions of strangers online. We prefer to hear what’s best from people that we trust.

We said “no” to leaderboards. We said “nah” to points, badges, streaks, or followers. We said “thank u, next” to social feeds where we watch other people’s lives instead of living our own.

And “absolutely not” to annoying ads.

That one’s important. Our promise to you is that this won’t be a place where advertisers rule what you see. We may partner with others to suggest new things to you, but only from sources that meet our community’s stamp of approval.

We commit to focusing on you, our user, by making an app you want to use.

We’ll add some paid features eventually, but we think they’ll be worth it. Plus, we’ll always have a free version.

If any of this resonates with you, give North a try and let us know what you think.

Bon voyage, friend.