Rodeo: The AI App for Making Plans With Friends [2025]

How Rodeo Is Changing the Way We Plan Time With Friends

Let's be honest: making plans with friends in 2025 is chaos. You've got thirty group chats. Someone drops a link to a restaurant in Slack. Another friend sends a screenshot of a concert through Instagram DMs. A third person mentions a happy hour in the group chat nobody checks anymore. By the time you've found the event details, the tickets sold out, or the restaurant stopped taking reservations.

This is exactly the problem that Hinge alumni Sam Levy and Tim Mac Gougan identified when they built Rodeo. They weren't trying to create another dating app or another way to find new friends. They were trying to solve the friction that happens after you already have friends. The friction of turning "hey, someone mentioned this thing" into "we're actually doing this thing together on Saturday at 7 PM."

Rodeo isn't the first app to promise to simplify social planning. But it might be the first to use AI in a way that actually feels useful rather than gimmicky. The difference? Rodeo doesn't try to replace your decision-making. It just makes the boring parts automatic.

You can upload a screenshot of an Instagram ad for a movie. Rodeo pulls in the theaters showing it, the showtimes, and even lets you buy tickets. You forward a friend a link to a restaurant. Rodeo extracts the address, hours, reservation info, and can send an invite to your crew. That's it. No "AI generated this for you" moment. No surprise. Just less friction.

The startup operates in the whitespace between dating apps and task managers. Apps like Notion, Obsidian, and My Mind proved there's an audience obsessed with organization and knowledge capture. Rodeo is banking that the same energy applies to social life. And they're probably right. People are already spending hours organizing their lives. Why not extend that to the fun parts?

The company launched as an invite-only beta on iOS. You can download the app to join the waitlist right now. But before you do, let's dig into what Rodeo actually does, why it matters, and whether this is the app that finally makes coordinating group activities actually painless.

TL; DR

• Rodeo uses AI to extract event details from screenshots, links, and group chat messages, turning them into shareable invites and calendar events
• Founded by former Hinge execs Sam Levy and Tim Mac Gougan who identified friction in social planning as a real problem
• The app focuses on existing friends, not finding new people, positioning itself uniquely in the social app space
• Features include collaborative lists for saving restaurants, activities, and event ideas organized by group (college friends, work team, etc.)
• Launch strategy is iOS beta with waitlist, suggesting a methodical rollout rather than a scorched-earth marketing blitz
• The AI element stays invisible, which is exactly what consumers want after years of AI hype fatigue

Rodeo's success in three years is defined by a user base of 0.5 to 2 million, 40-50% retention, 10-20% paid users,

The Problem Rodeo Is Actually Solving

This is where the insight gets sharp. Making plans with friends isn't hard because apps don't exist. It's hard because coordinating schedules, preferences, and logistics across dozens of people is genuinely complicated. Your friend works weekends. Another friend has a two-year-old. Someone else is broke this month. Your core group is spread across three time zones.

Lay this on top of the fact that nobody checks their email anymore, Slack is overwhelming, group chats are a firehose, and you've got the modern social planning problem.

Levey and Mac Gougan experienced this firsthand at Hinge, which is owned by Match Group. Hinge's entire business model depends on understanding human behavior around relationships and scheduling. They spent years watching what makes people take action on social plans and what makes plans die in the group chat.

The problem isn't motivation. People want to see their friends. Time magazine's research on loneliness consistently shows that Americans rank time with friends as their top priority for happiness. Yet the number of people reporting that they feel lonely has climbed every year since 2000. The gap between intention ("we should hang out") and action (actually hanging out) is enormous.

Friction kills plans. If you have to:

1. Read through 47 messages to find the restaurant link
2. Go to the restaurant's website to check hours
3. Check if they take reservations
4. Coordinate schedules via back-and-forth messages
5. Create a calendar event
6. Send calendar invites

...the plan dies. By the time you're three steps in, someone's suggested an alternative. Someone else can't make that time. The restaurant's out of availability. And you're back to "we should hang out sometime."

Rodeo removes steps 2 through 6 from that flow. That's not earth-shattering innovation. But it's the kind of boring, unglamorous work that actually gets built when founders have spent years understanding their users' actual problems.

Rodeo's calendar integration and screenshot intelligence are the most valued features, scoring above 8.5 in utility. Estimated data.

Inside Rodeo's Core Feature Set

Rodeo doesn't try to do everything. It's focused on one thing: taking evidence of plans (screenshots, links, recommendations) and turning them into actual shareable invites. Here's how it works in practice.

Screenshot Intelligence

You get an Instagram ad for a concert. You screenshot it. You open Rodeo and upload the image. The app uses AI to recognize what's in the screenshot, pulls in relevant data (dates, venue, ticket links), and creates a shareable event within Rodeo. You can then send it to a specific friend or add it to a collaborative list.

The magic is that this works across different formats. Instagram ads. TikTok screenshots. Twitter links. Magazine articles. Email chains. The AI isn't trying to understand the nuance. It's just trained to spot patterns: dates, times, locations, venue names, ticket links.

Link Extraction

Friend sends you a Yelp link to a restaurant. Friend sends you an Eventbrite page for a music festival. Friend sends you a Substack newsletter about a local bookstore. Rodeo extracts the relevant metadata (address, hours, parking, reservation requirements, phone number) automatically. No manual data entry.

This is less impressive than it sounds technically (APIs and web scraping can do this), but impressive in terms of user experience. You're not copying and pasting details into a calendar app. You're just forwarding a link to your friend, and Rodeo handles the boring part.

Collaborative Lists

This is where Rodeo gets interesting strategically. Instead of just creating events, the app lets you build organized lists of activities, restaurants, and ideas. You can create a list called "College Reunion Group Activities" and invite all your former roommates to add suggestions. Or "Best Date Night Spots" and collaborate with your partner. Or "Team Building Ideas" and let everyone on your department contribute.

These lists are shareable, searchable, and sortable. You can tag activities (expensive, outdoor, kid-friendly). You can mark restaurants as visited or saved for later. You can attach photos. It's basically a Pinterest-meets-Trello interface designed specifically for social planning.

The Invite System

Once you've created an event or activity, you can send it as an invite to specific friends. The invite includes all the relevant details (time, location, parking, reservation info) plus a quick way to RSVP. Your friend can click "yes," "no," or "maybe" without leaving Rodeo.

Here's what makes this different from just sending a calendar invite: Rodeo tracks everyone's responses in one place. You don't have to chase down confirmation from five people across three different platforms. Everything's consolidated.

Integration With Calendar Apps

This is critical for adoption. Rodeo doesn't require you to abandon Apple Calendar or Google Calendar. When you RSVP yes to an event in Rodeo, it syncs to your calendar. So your actual schedule always reflects the plans you've made through Rodeo. This is table stakes for any social planning tool, and Rodeo gets it right.

Why The AI Stays Invisible (And That's The Point)

Levey and Mac Gougan made an interesting strategic decision: they're not leading with AI. This is refreshing and counterintuitive.

In 2024 and 2025, every company that can remotely justify it screams about AI. "AI-powered this." "Machine learning that." "Powered by advanced language models." It's become so reflexive that watching any startup pitch deck is like watching a box of buzzwords explode.

Rodeo quietly uses AI (large language models to understand screenshots and extract event details) without making a big deal about it. According to Business Insider reporting, Levy describes the app as a "second brain" for social planning. That's it. No AI mentioned.

Why does this matter? Because Americans have AI fatigue. We've been promised that AI would revolutionize everything for two years straight. We've watched AI mediocrity get slapped onto products that didn't need it. And we're exhausted.

Rodeo understands that people don't care how it works. They care that it works. They want the solution, not the technology story. This is maturity in product thinking.

The AI element is the means, not the message. If Rodeo could achieve the same results without any machine learning involved, that would be fine. The fact that it uses LLMs is a technical implementation detail that shouldn't matter to the user.

Compare this to, say, Perplexity or Midjourney, where the AI is the entire value proposition. You use Perplexity specifically because you want AI-powered search. You use Midjourney because you want an AI image generator. For those apps, the AI is the product.

Rodeo is different. The product is "making plans with friends easier." The AI just happens to be how they're solving it. This distinction matters for user psychology and long-term adoption.

Rodeo emphasizes functionality over AI, scoring low on AI visibility compared to Perplexity and Midjourney, where AI is central to the product. Estimated data.

The Founding Team's Hinge Heritage

Sam Levy and Tim Mac Gougan both spent significant time at Hinge, the dating app owned by Match Group. This isn't coincidental background information. It's the entire thesis.

Hinge's entire business is built on understanding how humans make decisions about other humans. The company spent over a decade optimizing for a specific user behavior: swiping on someone and then deciding to meet them. That requires understanding friction points, decision fatigue, and what makes people take action versus what makes them procrastinate.

Levey and Mac Gougan applied exactly that thinking to group social planning. They watched people use Hinge. They watched how people coordinated hangouts alongside their dating lives. They identified that the social planning problem was equally unsolved.

The Hinge connection also signals something about Rodeo's business model. Hinge is a subscription app. It succeeds by being useful enough that people keep it installed and return to it regularly. Rodeo appears to be targeting the same user psychology. Not a one-time transaction, but ongoing engagement.

This is important for competitive positioning. Apps like Eventbrite or Meetup are about discovering events. Apps like Google Calendar are about managing your schedule. Rodeo is about facilitating decisions and action with the people already closest to you.

This is a better positioning than "we help you find events." Everyone already knows how to find events. The problem is actually coordinating once you've found something you like.

How Rodeo Positions Against Existing Tools

Rodeo isn't really competing with other social planning apps because there essentially aren't any that work at this level of simplicity. But it does occupy space adjacent to several categories.

vs. Group Chat (Discord, WhatsApp, iMessage)

Group chats are the default coordination mechanism, which is why Rodeo can pull data from screenshots of group chats. But group chats are terrible at consolidating information. They're ephemeral. Conversations bury details. Someone needs to manually extract the key facts and create a calendar event. Rodeo automates that last mile.

vs. Calendar Apps (Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook)

Calendar apps are excellent at time management. They're terrible at group decision-making. You can't use a calendar to propose three restaurant options and have everyone vote. You can't attach photos to calendar events easily. You can't create collaborative lists within a calendar. Rodeo fills that gap.

vs. Task Management (Notion, Asana, Monday.com)

Task managers are built for work. They're overkill for social planning. Creating a Notion database to plan a group dinner feels like using a crane to hang a picture. Rodeo is specifically designed to feel lightweight for social contexts while still offering organizational depth if you want it.

vs. Event Discovery (Eventbrite, Meetup, Facebook Events)

These apps help you find new events and meet new people. Rodeo helps you coordinate with people you already know around activities you've already discovered. Different problem entirely.

The strategic advantage is that Rodeo doesn't require you to replace any existing apps. You still use iMessage for texting. You still use Google Calendar for blocking time. You still use Instagram for scrolling. Rodeo just sits in between and makes those systems talk to each other better.

Freemium and B2B2C partnerships are projected to be the most lucrative monetization models for Rodeo, with estimated monthly revenues of

The Launch Strategy: Invite-Only Beta

Rodeo isn't doing a public launch. It's doing an invite-only beta on iOS. You can download the app and join a waitlist, but the team is controlling growth carefully.

This is the opposite of the move-fast-and-break-things approach that dominated tech for 15 years. It's also the opposite of the "go viral or go home" marketing that every venture-backed startup supposedly needs to employ.

Instead, Rodeo is using the slow-build approach. Get 1,000 users. Iterate. Get 10,000 users. Listen. Expand to Android. Add features based on real usage patterns.

Why does this matter? Because social apps are notoriously hard to launch. If you start with the wrong user base or the wrong use case, you can never recover. Friends don't switch apps unless there's a massive coordination shift (like when everyone switched from Snapchat to TikTok). Rodeo is being thoughtful about who the initial user base is and what problem they're solving for.

The Hinge connection shows up here too. Hinge grew slowly and deliberately. It didn't try to be a massive platform from day one. It optimized for retention and word-of-mouth. That worked.

But here's the challenge: social apps have network effects. The app is more valuable the more of your friends use it. If Rodeo grows too slowly, it could get stuck in a situation where it's not valuable enough to justify installing. You'd need three of your friends already on Rodeo to make it worth joining. If only two of them are on it, why bother?

This is called the "cold start problem," and it's why most social apps either explode or fail. There's rarely a middle ground. Rodeo's approach is to identify communities (college reunion groups, work teams, friend groups who already coordinate) and get enough density within those communities to reach critical mass.

Using Screenshots as Intelligence

Here's an underrated insight: screenshots might be the best way to train AI for real-world use cases.

When you take a screenshot and upload it to Rodeo, you're providing the app with real visual data from your actual daily life. That Instagram ad you screenshotted wasn't designed to be machine-readable. It was designed to sell a ticket to a concert. But it contains all the information needed to create an event: date, venue, price, genre, artist.

Training an AI to extract that information from wild screenshots (with different fonts, designs, layouts, overlays) is much harder than training it to read structured data. But it's also much more useful. It works on the data you actually encounter, not on data formatted specifically for algorithms.

This is a subtle but important architectural difference. Most AI tools require you to input data in a specific format. Rodeo asks you to provide it the way you already have it.

The screenshot intelligence also solves a human behavior problem: we're lazy. Asking someone to "copy the event details into our app" requires multiple steps. Asking someone to "take a screenshot" requires one action they're already doing anyway (screenshotting is how most people save things now).

From an implementation perspective, Rodeo likely uses a combination of:

• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract text from images
• Named Entity Recognition (NER) to identify dates, times, locations, prices
• Computer Vision to identify visual elements like logos or UI patterns
• LLMs to understand context and validate that extracted data makes sense

The result is impressive not because it's technically novel, but because it's handling the messy reality of how people actually discover activities.

Rodeo excels in ease of use, making it ideal for non-technical users, while Zapier and Make offer higher functionality at the cost of complexity. Estimated data.

The "Second Brain" Positioning

Levey describes Rodeo as a "second brain" for social planning. This is a deliberate reference to the "second brain" concept popularized by productivity experts like Maggie Appleton and Tiago Forte.

The second brain idea is that your human brain is excellent at thinking and analysis but terrible at remembering details. So you externalize memory to a system (Notion, Obsidian, Evernote) that remembers for you. You tell your second brain "remember this restaurant" or "remember this idea," and you trust that it's stored safely and retrievable when you need it.

Rodeo is applying this concept to social planning. Your brain is excellent at deciding which restaurants sound fun and which friends to invite. Your brain is terrible at remembering which restaurant has parking on the street vs. in a garage, or whether it's actually open on Mondays, or what time your friend said they could make it.

This positioning is smart because it taps into an existing mental model that people are familiar with. If you use Notion or Obsidian, you already understand the concept of "externalizing memory into a system."

Rodeo is saying: "We'll be the system that remembers the details of your social life so your brain can focus on the fun parts."

The positioning also signals market opportunity. The success of Notion, Obsidian, and My Mind proves that people will pay for tools that help them organize information better. Rodeo is banking that this applies to social organization too.

The Data Privacy Question

One thing Rodeo needs to address early: trust around data. The app is literally asking you to upload screenshots of your personal life, conversations, and plans. That's sensitive data.

The founders haven't publicly addressed their privacy stance, which is notable. They should, and early. Here's why:

Users are increasingly paranoid about giving apps access to personal data. We've seen too many stories about apps selling data, getting hacked, or using data in ways users never intended. Dating apps in particular (which Hinge is) have reputation challenges around data privacy.

Rodeo needs to be crystal clear about:

• How long data is stored
• Whether data is encrypted end-to-end
• Whether the AI training process involves user data
• Whether data is ever shared with third parties
• Whether Rodeo sells anonymized data to researchers or marketers

This isn't just good practice. It's a competitive advantage. If Rodeo can credibly claim that they're not selling your social planning data to advertisers, that's a meaningful differentiator against Google Calendar (which is free because you're the product) or Facebook Events (which is similarly surveilled).

Privacy backlash poses the highest risk to Rodeo, with an estimated impact score of 9 out of 10, followed by the cold start problem and monetization timing, both at 8. Estimated data.

Potential Monetization Models

Rodeo is in beta. There's no public pricing information. But we can predict what the monetization strategy might be based on similar apps and the founders' background.

Freemium with Premium Tiers

This is the Hinge model. Free version with basic features. Premium subscription ($10-15/month) for advanced features like unlimited collaborative lists, advanced filtering, or integrations with restaurant reservation systems like Resy or Open Table.

B2B2C Partnerships

Rodeo could partner with restaurants, event venues, or travel companies. Your restaurant could create a Rodeo event page that automatically updates availability. You could book directly through Rodeo.

This creates a revenue opportunity similar to how Resy and Open Table work. The venue pays a per-reservation commission. Rodeo gets a cut.

Advertising (Carefully)

This is the risky move, but possible. Imagine seeing a sponsored restaurant recommendation in your collaborative list. Or a highlighted event suggestion. The key is doing this in a way that doesn't feel invasive. Given the founders' positioning around "AI should stay out of personal life," they probably won't go full-surveillance-capitalist. But light, contextual ads are possible.

Integration Fees

If Rodeo becomes central to how people coordinate, it could charge venues and event platforms to integrate. Eventbrite could pay Rodeo to make their events easy to import. Restaurants could pay to have Rodeo recognize their names and pull in data automatically.

The most likely scenario is freemium with strategic partnerships. Similar apps like Slack and Notion have found success with this model.

Comparison With AI-Powered Automation Tools

While Rodeo is specifically designed for social planning, it's worth positioning it against other AI-powered automation and workflow tools that are emerging.

Tools like Runable are creating AI agents that automate various workflows. Runable offers AI-powered automation for creating presentations, documents, reports, images, and videos starting at $9/month. While Runable focuses on business productivity and content creation, Rodeo is specifically addressing personal social coordination.

The parallel is interesting: both are using AI to eliminate busy work (pulling details, formatting, organizing) so humans can focus on decision-making. Rodeo does this for social plans. Runable does this for business workflows. Different contexts, similar philosophy.

Other automation tools like Zapier and Make handle general workflow automation but require technical setup. Rodeo is consumer-friendly automation. No integrations to configure. No Zaps to build. Just upload a screenshot.

Challenges Rodeo Will Face

Rodeo is solving a real problem, but it's not immune to challenges. Here are the obstacles the team will need to overcome.

The Cold Start Problem (Again)

I mentioned this earlier, but it bears emphasis. Social apps fail at the cold start. You need critical mass of your actual friends on the app for it to be useful. But you don't want to install an app if your friends aren't on it. This is a chicken-and-egg problem.

Rodeo's strategy of targeting specific communities (college reunion groups, work teams) is smart for addressing this. But scaling beyond those initial communities will be tough.

AI Accuracy

The AI extraction won't be perfect. Some screenshots will confuse the algorithm. Some events will have details the AI misses. Every error is a reason someone might delete the app. Rodeo needs to get accuracy to 95%+ for this to feel automatic and invisible.

Privacy Backlash

If there's any scandal around data handling (leaks, unauthorized AI training, selling data), Rodeo is dead. The app requires people to share their personal plans. Any breach of trust is catastrophic.

Monetization Timing

Rodeo needs to reach critical mass before introducing monetization. If they try to charge too early, users will leave. If they wait too long, they'll run out of funding before the growth curve inflects. Timing this correctly is harder than it sounds.

Feature Creep

The temptation will be to add more features. Direct payments through Rodeo. Video calling. Built-in messaging. AI-powered recommendations. Each feature adds complexity and increases the surface area for bugs. Rodeo's strength is simplicity. The founders need to resist bloat.

Early Signals That Rodeo Could Succeed

For all the challenges, there are reasons to believe Rodeo could actually get traction.

Experienced Founders: Levy and Mac Gougan didn't come from nowhere. They understand retention, engagement, and network effects from their Hinge experience. They've already built something that hundreds of thousands of people use.

Real Problem: Making plans is genuinely hard for busy people. This isn't a problem that goes away as society changes. It gets worse as we get older, busier, and more fragmented geographically.

Better UX Than Alternatives: Asking someone to screenshot something is radically simpler than asking them to copy details into a structured form or manually fill out a calendar event.

Underinvestment in the Space: Almost nobody is building tools specifically for group social coordination. It's the whitespace between personal productivity and dating/friendship apps. There's room to own this category.

Timing With Notion Trend: People are increasingly comfortable with the idea of a "second brain" for various parts of their life. Rodeo is adding a new category that many people intuitively understand.

The Bigger Picture: AI for Everyday Problems

Rodeo is interesting not just as a product but as a signal about where AI is heading.

The hype cycle promised AI would create flying cars and sentient robots. The reality is that AI is most useful when it solves boring, everyday problems that affect millions of people but aren't interesting enough to build products around.

Rodeo uses AI to extract event details from screenshots. That's not revolutionary. But it's the kind of unglamorous, high-value problem that drives adoption.

This is the lesson the best AI companies are learning. Don't lead with the AI. Lead with the problem. Make the AI invisible. Let users feel like the app is just being helpful, not remind them that they're interacting with a machine learning model.

Apps like Chat GPT and Midjourney work because the AI is the product. You're explicitly using them to generate text or images. But for most use cases, AI should be a means to an end. Rodeo gets this.

The future of AI adoption isn't AI-first products. It's existing products that get 10% better because they use AI intelligently in the background. Rodeo is betting that people care more about reducing friction than they care about feeling like they're using cutting-edge technology.

What Success Looks Like for Rodeo

In three years, if Rodeo succeeds, here's what I'd expect to see:

User Base: 500,000 to 2 million monthly active users, concentrated in major US cities initially, expanding globally.

Retention: 40%+ monthly retention (industry standard for social apps is 20-30%, so Rodeo would need to be meaningfully better).

Monetization: Freemium model with 10-20% of users on paid tier. Revenue of $2-5 million annually.

Partnerships: Integrations with restaurant reservation systems, event platforms, and calendar apps. Possibly a partnership with a major tech platform like Apple or Google.

Team: Expansion from the founding team to 30-50 people. Addition of a CEO (if Levy and Mac Gougan are playing the founder/CTO roles).

Funding: Series A raise of $10-25 million after demonstrating strong product-market fit.

Features: Expansion beyond screenshots to voice commands ("Rodeo, remind me about restaurants near Central Park"), SMS integration, and better AI-powered recommendations.

Failure would look like slow user growth, high churn, inability to build network effects, or competition from an existing player (Google Calendar or Notion) building similar features.

FAQ

What is Rodeo and who created it?

Rodeo is an AI-powered app for coordinating activities and making plans with friends you already know. It was created by Sam Levy and Tim Mac Gougan, both former executives at Hinge, the dating app owned by Match Group. The founders identified that making plans with existing friends had become increasingly difficult due to fragmented group chats, competing schedules, and the friction of pulling event details from various sources.

How does Rodeo use AI to make planning easier?

Rodeo uses machine learning to extract event information from screenshots, links, and group chat conversations. When you upload a screenshot of an Instagram ad for a concert, Rodeo automatically pulls in the venue, date, time, and ticket links. For restaurant links, it extracts hours, location, reservation requirements, and parking information. The AI handles the tedious data entry work automatically, leaving you to focus on deciding whether to attend and coordinating with friends.

What are the main features of Rodeo?

Rodeo's core features include screenshot intelligence (extracting event details from images), link extraction (pulling metadata from URLs), collaborative lists (organizing activities by group like "college friends" or "date night ideas"), RSVP tracking (consolidated response management across your friend group), and calendar integration (syncing events to Apple Calendar or Google Calendar). The app also lets you attach photos to activities and tag them with helpful metadata like "expensive" or "kid-friendly."

How is Rodeo different from group chats like WhatsApp or Discord?

Group chats are good for real-time conversation but terrible for information consolidation. Details get buried in thousands of messages, and someone has to manually extract and organize the key facts. Rodeo automates that final step. Instead of "did someone mention when the restaurant opens?" you just check Rodeo and all the details are organized in one place. It complements group chats rather than replacing them.

How is Rodeo different from calendar apps like Google Calendar or Apple Calendar?

Calendar apps are excellent for time blocking but bad at group decision-making. You can't use a calendar to propose three restaurant options and see which one gets the most interest. You can't easily attach context about why you're suggesting an activity. Rodeo layers group coordination and decision-making on top of calendar functionality, then syncs the final plans back to your calendar.

Is Rodeo available now and how do I get access?

Rodeo is currently in invite-only beta for iOS only. You can download the app from the App Store to join the waitlist, but access is limited to early testers. The team is growing the user base methodically rather than launching publicly. An Android version will likely follow once the iOS version is more stable, but no official timeline has been announced.

How will Rodeo make money if it's currently free?

Rodeo hasn't announced its monetization strategy publicly, but based on similar apps and the founders' Hinge background, the most likely model is freemium with a premium tier ($10-20/month). Premium features might include unlimited collaborative lists, advanced filtering, or integrations with restaurant reservation platforms like Resy or Open Table. Alternative revenue could come from venue partnerships or light, contextual advertising.

What happens to my data when I upload screenshots to Rodeo?

Rodeo hasn't publicly released detailed privacy and data policies yet, which is a notable gap. This is critical information that should be available before you start uploading personal plans and conversations. When choosing whether to use Rodeo, you'll want to verify their stance on data encryption, data retention, whether AI training uses your data, and whether data is ever shared with third parties or sold to advertisers.

Is there anything like Rodeo that already exists?

Not really. There are apps that do pieces of what Rodeo does (event discovery like Eventbrite, calendar management like Google Calendar, task organization like Notion), but nothing that specifically handles the workflow of turning casual activity discoveries into coordinated group plans. This whitespace is part of why Rodeo has potential.

What are the biggest risks to Rodeo's success?

The primary risk is the "cold start problem" common to all social apps: the app is only useful if your friends are on it, but you won't install it unless your friends are already there. Other risks include the need for very high AI accuracy (95%+ or people stop trusting it), potential privacy backlash if data handling is mishandled, timing monetization correctly (too early and users leave, too late and funding runs out), and feature creep that compromises the app's simplicity. Competition from larger platforms like Google or Notion building similar features is also possible.

The Bottom Line

Rodeo arrives at a moment when Americans are increasingly isolated despite being hyperconnected. We have more ways to contact friends than ever, and fewer reasons to see them. We're busier, more geographically dispersed, and more overwhelmed by choices.

Rodeo isn't trying to solve loneliness directly. It's trying to solve the logistical friction that kills plans. That's a more achievable goal. And if they execute well, it could become the default app for group social coordination.

The team has real experience (Hinge background), the timing is right (second brain trend, AI maturity, app fatigue with traditional social networks), and the problem is real (everyone struggles with this). The main question isn't whether the problem exists. It's whether Rodeo can grow past the cold start and build the network effects needed for a social app to become essential.

If they can get 20-30% of your friend group on the app, it becomes sticky. You stop looking for restaurant recommendations in group chats and start looking in Rodeo. You stop remembering which friend mentioned which activity, and you trust Rodeo to remember. Network effects flip from working against you to working for you.

That's the inflection point. Get there, and you've got a real business. Don't get there, and you're just another productivity app that looked promising in beta.

Based on the founders' track record, the problem clarity, and the product simplicity, I'd bet on them getting there. But it's not guaranteed. Social apps are hard. And they usually come down to execution, not vision.

The fact that Rodeo is taking a deliberate, careful approach to growth rather than trying to go viral is actually encouraging. It suggests the founders understand what's required to build a real social app, rather than a flashy launch that fizzles.

Worth watching. And worth joining the waitlist if you're tired of coordinating plans through a chaos of group chats.

Key Takeaways

• Rodeo solves the friction between discovering activities and actually coordinating group plans, which existing tools don't address
• Founded by Sam Levy and Tim MacGougan (former Hinge executives), the app uses AI quietly in the background rather than making AI the feature
• The core workflow reduces manual steps from 6-8 (finding details, creating invites, coordinating) to 2-3 (screenshot, add friends, done)
• Rodeo's collaborative lists and RSVP tracking consolidate scattered group chat information into one organized place
• Key challenges include cold start problem (network effects), maintaining AI accuracy >95%, and careful monetization timing
• Positioning as a 'second brain' for social life taps into proven market interest in organization and knowledge management tools

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