About Cerca
Cerca is a social map for the places that matter to the people you trust. We save the spots your friends recommend so you stop losing them to screenshots and group chats — and we surface those saved places, attributed to specific friends, when you can't decide where to go. No averaged stars. No anonymous reviewer scores. No editorial picks from people you've never met.
The problem Cerca was built to fix
Two problems that bleed into each other.
Capture failure. Places get lost. Your friend mentions a coffee shop you'd love and three weeks later you can't remember the name. Your group chat surfaces "that pizza place in Williamsburg" twice a year and dies before anyone writes it down. Your Notes app has a dozen entries that say "the bar with the back patio" with no address. The places worth remembering die in screenshots.
Decision paralysis. When dinner rolls around, you don't trust Yelp's averaged-stranger reviews. You can't surface what your friends actually liked. Google Maps is too cluttered to filter through any signal you trust. So you open Yelp, see "4.3 stars," and pick the place with the shortest wait — and you eat somewhere lame.
These aren't unrelated. The friend who mentioned the coffee shop knows where you should go for breakfast on Saturday. The information you need at decision-time is the information you already have — just trapped in places it can't help you.
How Cerca works
You save places fast — three taps from any Google Maps search. You see your friends' saves on a map, each friend tagged with their own color, with their notes attached. You filter by city when you travel. You filter by neighborhood when you're deciding tonight. You mark places visited and loved as you go. Everything stays attributed to a specific person — saves don't become aggregate scores, ever.
The detailed product walkthrough lives on the homepage. This page is about why.
Why we built it this way
Two convictions, working together.
The social graph is the decision layer.
When you ask a friend "where should I eat in Chicago this weekend?", you don't want them to give you an average. You want them to tell you what they liked, where they'd go again, what's worth the detour. The most valuable signal in place decisions isn't "what 10,000 strangers thought on average" — it's "what one person whose taste you've calibrated to over years thinks." Cerca treats the friend graph as a first-class decision primitive: saves attributed per person, profiles browsable, taste-track-records visible.
AI is the curation engine, not the recommendation engine.
When the everyday product is mature, Cerca will build an AI surface that synthesizes friend signals into views like: "places six of your friends have saved within a mile that are open tonight," "Friday plan from your well-traveled friends' new saves in your neighborhood." The AI isn't a generic LLM travel agent (Google can ship that anytime). It's a curation engine that only Cerca's data shape — your specific friend graph + saves + visits + notes — can power. The free product is the social-graph layer; the paid future is what AI does with it.
Both convictions show up in the same product. Friend-attributed saves are useful on day one (the free core, available now). The AI surface that synthesizes them is the longer arc (post-PMF, paid).
The principles we built around
A few decisions that show up everywhere in Cerca:
No averaged ratings.
Cerca has a 4-value rating per save — disliked, meh, liked, loved — but it's always attributed to a specific person, never averaged across people. Aggregate scores hide the people behind them; we'd rather show them.
No "Cerca picks" framing.
When you see a recommended place on Cerca, it's because a specific named person saved it. There's no editorial staff picking restaurants on behalf of a brand. The brand has no opinion. The people do.
No lists, no collections, no guides.
The atomic unit is the place plus the person who saved it. Not "Cerca's Top 25 NYC Restaurants" — instead, "Pete's 638 NYC saves, filtered the way you want." Cerca trusts the person who actually goes there more than the editor.
Privacy by default.
Profiles can be public or private. Notes on saved places are private until you explicitly share them. The friends-only friend graph is a feature, not a growth-team's-best-friend.
Who built this
Cerca is built by Arvin Dang and Pete Albertson. The product began because of one specific habit that wasn't being served by any existing app: the founders kept losing the places their friends recommended.
Cerca is a Rails app, web-first, no iOS app planned. Hosted on Fly.
If this resonates, start saving your own places. The product is free. The friend graph is yours. The taste-people in your life already know where to go — Cerca just remembers it for them.