Started with a group chat.
Vibes started in a group chat. Four of us — me plus three friends — kept sending each other songs, and the songs kept getting buried under everything else. Apartment plans, dinner negotiations, screenshots, the usual chaos. The thing we were actually doing, which was a private little world of music recommendations between people who knew each other's taste, was getting eaten by the medium.
I tried Spotify Blend. I tried sending Apple Music links. I tried — sorry — I tried Discord. Nothing felt right because nothing was made for it. Sharing music with four specific people is not a use case that scales to advertiser-supported social products. So I made my own.
The first version was an iMessage extension that took twelve weekends. The second was a real iOS app that took six months and ate most of my savings. The third — the version that's on TestFlight now — is a proper, designed thing built around a single idea: songs deserve postcards, not feeds.
Who's making this
It's just me.
Designed and shipped iOS apps at two companies before this. Lives in Brooklyn. Plays bass badly. The whole company, for now — design, engineering, backend, support inbox, and the person who keeps remembering to renew the domain.
That's it. That's the company. One person, one laptop, one strong opinion about how music should travel between friends. I'm not hiring yet — when I am, it'll be on the jobs page and not before.
What I believe
A small, deliberate point of view.
Music is intimate. The right song at the right moment from the right person changes how a day feels. I want the app to honor that — not turn it into engagement bait.
Algorithms are strangers. When the feed decides what you see, the feed gets credit for the find. I'd rather your friends did. Read the long version.
Software should be small. I'm not trying to be everywhere. I'm trying to be one specific thing, done extremely well, for the few thousand people who actually want it.
Privacy is a feature. The thing the app does — finds your friends — happens entirely on your device. The server never sees your raw contacts. Here's how.
Funding
Bootstrapped. For now.
Vibes is self-funded out of my own pocket. No venture capital, no outside investment, no runway date breathing down my neck. That's a deliberate choice — it lets me say no to features and growth tactics that would compromise the product.
Eventually I'll need a business model. The plan is to add a small optional subscription that does something genuinely nice (a beautiful sharable annual recap, lossless audio for the audiophile diaspora, that sort of thing) — never to add ads, never to sell user data, never to gate the basic experience. If I ever change my mind about that, you'll see it here first.