Rodeo: The App for Making Plans With Friends
▼ Summary
– Rodeo is a new app that uses AI to help users schedule activities and make plans with their existing friends, differentiating it from dating or task-management apps.
– The app was founded by former Hinge executives who identified the difficulty of coordinating plans due to busy lives, parenting, and fragmented group chats.
– It streamlines planning by allowing users to upload social media posts or chat screenshots, from which it automatically pulls details like showtimes and enables ticket purchases and friend invitations.
– The app features collaborative lists for saving future activity ideas, such as restaurants or group outings, which friends can contribute to.
– While the AI component is understated in marketing, it is the key feature that automates the manual work of compiling event details and sending invites, positioning the app as an organizational “second brain.”
Navigating the complexities of modern social life can be surprisingly difficult. Between demanding careers, family responsibilities, and a constant stream of digital communication, actually coordinating time with friends often falls to the bottom of the list. Rodeo is a new app designed specifically to solve this problem, using intelligent technology to streamline the entire process of making plans with your existing social circle. Founded by former executives from the dating platform Hinge, the service aims to transform scattered ideas and conversations into concrete events.
The core functionality is built around simplicity. Users can capture inspiration from anywhere, a social media post about a concert, a text thread debating dinner options, or even a screenshot of a movie trailer. Rodeo processes this information, pulling in relevant details like showtimes, locations, and booking links to create a structured plan. From there, inviting friends is straightforward, with a quick option to “wrangle” them into your activity. This removes the tedious back-and-forth typically required to settle on a time and place.
Beyond one-off events, the app helps organize future ideas through collaborative lists. You might create a “Date Night” list to save restaurant recommendations or a “College Friends” list for potential group activities like paintball or hiking. Friends can be invited to contribute to these lists, making them a shared repository of potential plans for whenever schedules finally align.
Interestingly, the founders, Sam Levy and Tim MacGougan, are not heavily emphasizing the artificial intelligence that powers their platform. In a tech landscape saturated with AI hype, they recognize a public desire for technology that assists quietly in the background rather than intruding. The AI component is what truly differentiates Rodeo, however, by automating the manual work of aggregating event details and generating invites, tasks that would otherwise require switching between multiple apps and websites.
The company does lean into one popular concept, describing the app as a “second brain” for social planning. This taps into the same cultural drive for personal organization that has fueled the success of digital tools for note-taking and information management. Rodeo hopes to apply that same principle to our social lives, providing a dedicated space to nurture real-world connections.
Currently, Rodeo is operating as an invite-only beta. Those interested can download the iOS application to join a waiting list for access.
(Source: The Verge)
