The "DM me for the address" economy

Open any travel video on TikTok or Instagram. Look at the comments. "Name of the place??" "Address please 🙏" "DM me the location!" Hundreds of them, under millions of videos. And very often, the creator answers one by one, in private, for free.

Stop and look at what's actually happening there. A person spent years developing taste. They found a place worth filming. They produced a video good enough to make strangers desperate for the address. Demand is so real that people are literally begging in the comments. And the market-clearing price of that information has been set, by convention, at zero.

No other field works like this. We pay personal trainers because they know which exercises matter. We pay sommeliers through restaurant markups. We pay consultants for slide decks that say what a smart friend would tell you for free. Knowing which specific door to walk through in a foreign city — knowledge that can make or break a trip someone saved all year for — is somehow the one expertise that must be given away.

Creators feel the absurdity, which is why they've invented workarounds. Keeping the address secret to farm engagement, because comments feed the algorithm. "Follow me and I'll DM you." Link-in-bio Google Docs that get scraped and reposted within a week. These are all pricing mechanisms — awkward, leaky ones. The creator is being paid in attention, the one currency that doesn't pay rent.

And attention is a terrible price for the places themselves. When the only way to monetize a hidden gem is virality, every hidden gem is one good video away from a two-hour line. The creator gets a spike in followers, the restaurant gets overwhelmed, and the recommendation self-destructs. Everyone loses except the algorithm.

The fix is embarrassingly simple: let the address have a price. A creator puts their fifty best spots on a map, writes real context for each — what to order, when to go, which table to ask for — and sells it for the price of two coffees. The people who ask "address please??" are already telling you they want this. Some fraction of them will happily pay a few euros to stop begging in comments.

That's the entire bet behind Hotspot. Not that travel advice should be expensive — that it should stop being free by default. "DM me for the address" is a market signal that's been screaming for years. We're just building the checkout.