Why we're building Orbit
Last month I sat down at a restaurant and wanted to know one thing: what here is actually worth ordering? I opened Google. Four and a half stars from five thousand people I will never meet. I read eleven reviews and ordered the wrong thing.
Two weeks earlier a friend had told me about a place in Indiranagar. I'd forgotten the name. It wasn't written anywhere I could find it, because the places our friends love live in chats that scroll away.
I trust my friends more than five thousand strangers. Most people do. No app is built on that.
Instagram used to be where friends were. Meta's own numbers from the trial last year: the share of time people spend on friends' posts fell from eleven percent to seven. The rest is reels, creators and ads. It is a great entertainment product. It is no longer where your friends are.
Orbit is small on purpose. You can have 100 friends, or 2,000 with Orbit Plus, and nobody else can see who they are. Nothing you post is public. There is no feed that never ends, no explore page, no reels, and there will never be an ad, because the moment there is one, your friends' picks are for sale.
What you get instead: when you walk into a place, what your friends said about it, down to the dish. A way to ask them from the table. A map of their picks in your city, including the chai stall that isn't on any map. Photos and short videos for them only. And, when you choose, where they are right now, with their battery level, because that was the most loved detail of the best friends' map ever built.
We're starting with our own friends in Bangalore, on iPhone, by invitation. If it works for a hundred people who know each other, it will work for you and yours.
