here’s how it always went.
“where do you wanna eat?” “i don’t care, you pick.” so i’d pick. thai? “hmm, i had thai on tuesday.” ok, sushi? “that’s kinda expensive for a wednesday.” burgers? “i’m not really feeling heavy food.” and then twenty minutes later we’d be sitting on the couch eating whatever was already in the fridge, both mildly annoyed at each other for no real reason.
every single time.
and the thing is — she wasn’t being difficult. i’ve done the exact same thing to other people. you genuinely think you don’t care, and then someone suggests something and suddenly you discover that actually you do care, you just didn’t know it until someone put a wrong answer in front of you.
it’s the same thing as the coinflip theory — you’re never actually 50/50, you just don’t know which side you’re on until something forces a reaction. every veto is a coinflip landing on the wrong side.
this is not a personality flaw. this is how people work.
the problem nobody’s solving
every restaurant app on the planet gives you more options. google maps drops a hundred pins around your blue dot. yelp gives you a ranked list of 50 places sorted by stars. tripadvisor, the fork, whatever — they all assume the problem is “i don’t know what’s near me.” that was true in 2008. it’s not true anymore. you know what’s near you. you’ve scrolled past all of it a dozen times.
the real problem is picking one. and the more options you see, the harder it gets. there’s a name for this — the paradox of choice — but you don’t need a psych textbook to understand it. you’ve lived it every time you spent fifteen minutes on a delivery app and then closed it without ordering.
nobody was building the thing that just tells you where to go.
so i built it
snackr doesn’t show you a list. it asks you what you’re in the mood for — you swipe through cuisines, yes or no, takes maybe ten seconds — and then it gives you one place. one. not a top 10. not a curated list. one restaurant that fits what you want, where you are, and what’s actually open right now.
that’s the whole idea. remove the decision. just go eat.
it started as a dumb side project i was building between shifts. the kind of thing you hack on at midnight because you had an idea in the shower and you figure you’ll get bored of it in a week. i didn’t get bored. the more i used it, the more i realized the concept actually held up. when the app just picks for you, you stop agonizing and start eating. turns out that’s what i wanted all along — not better recommendations, just fewer of them.
the couples problem is actually a group problem
the argument i was having with my ex? everyone has it. couples, friend groups, coworkers trying to pick a lunch spot. the dynamic is always the same: one person proposes, another vetoes, nobody wants to be the one who makes the final call because if it sucks, that’s on them now.
so i built group mode. everyone in the group swipes independently, snackr finds the overlap, and spits out a place that works for everyone. no arguing. no twenty-message group chat spiral. no “i’m easy, you pick” from the person who’s about to veto four restaurants in a row. the app does the negotiation so you don’t have to.
it’s live now
snackr is on the app store. google play is in closed beta. it works everywhere google maps works, which is basically everywhere.
i’m not going to pretend this is some world-changing thing. it’s a restaurant picker. but it solves a problem i had every single day, and based on every group chat i’ve ever been in, i’m not the only one. sometimes the best thing you can build is the small, obvious thing that nobody bothered to make yet.
the app is free. there’s a paid tier if you want group mode and more picks per month, but the core thing — swipe, get a restaurant, go eat — that’s free.
snackr.food if you want to check it out.
— alex
the answer was never more options. it was one good one.