Zero users, full transparency: what we're building this summer

Most startup blogs start lying on day one. Everything is "growing fast," traction is "exciting," numbers are conveniently absent. We'd rather do the opposite, so here it is: Hotspot has approximately zero users. You are reading the blog of a product almost nobody uses yet. Welcome.

Here's what exists today, concretely. You can create an account and build a map of a place you know well. You drop pins — restaurants, bars, viewpoints, shops — and write real context for each one. You set a price. Someone who trusts your taste pays once and gets lifetime access. That whole loop works, end to end, today.

The part we spent the most time on is the part nobody sees: payments. Creators connect a Stripe account, pick their country, and get paid directly when their map sells. If someone buys your map before you've finished setting up payouts, the money doesn't vanish — it waits for you, and gets released the moment your account is ready. We built that before building almost anything else, because a marketplace that's sloppy with money deserves to have zero users forever.

What doesn't exist yet: discovery. Right now, if you publish a map, your buyers will come from your own audience — your Instagram bio, your newsletter, your group chats. We're fine with that for now. The first creators on Hotspot will be people who already have someone to sell to, and honestly, that's the right test. If a creator with a real audience can't sell a great map, the problem is the product, and we want to know that immediately.

This summer we're focused on three things. Making map creation fast enough that a creator can go from blank page to sellable map in an evening. Making the buying experience feel obviously worth it — a bought map should feel like a private document from a friend, not a webpage. And making payouts boring, in the best sense of the word.

Why write this post at all, if nobody's reading? Partly because a public record keeps us honest. Partly because the creators we want first are exactly the kind of people who read a zero-users post and think "good, I can still be early." And partly because in a year, this post will either look like the humble beginning of something real, or a well-documented failure. Either way, it will be true.

If you know a city better than the algorithm does, we'd like you to be one of the first. The bar is empty. Best time to arrive.