My Dude

Find the best things happening around you, from new restaurants to local events and hidden gems. No app, no feed. Just good stuff texted to you on your schedule.

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What it is

My Dude finds the best things happening around you, from new restaurants to local events and hidden gems. No app, no feed. Just good stuff texted to you on your schedule.

My Dude is built around three goals

  1. Get people into their local communities. Help them discover and support the places, events, and people that make where they live special.
  2. Make it easier to spend time with friends and family Turn “we should do something” into an actual plan.
  3. Get people off their phones and computers Deliver useful information that gets people out of the house through texts without another app, feed, or search session competing for their attention.

The problem is that credible events and high-quality local recommendations are scattered across calendars, social posts, maps, newsletters, flyers, and word of mouth. Discovering the hidden gems in a neighborhood still takes too much work.

My Dude closes that knowledge gap by bringing timely, personal recommendations through SMS. It is designed to help people get into their communities, out of the house, and off their phones.

How it works for a member

Members share their ZIP code, interests, preferred radius, and recommendation cadence. From there, My Dude provides three core experiences.

Personalized Drops are curated digests of five tailored recommendations, delivered without requiring members to search or remember to ask. They can arrive weekly or multiple times per week on the days and times each member chooses, making Drops the primary way My Dude proactively keeps people informed.

On-demand recommendations are My Dude's ability to respond to natural language queries by the user and get them relevant, high-quality recommendations from the database. This includes requests like "casual tacos near Roosevelt Row tonight" to asking My Dude to plan entire day trips with multiple stops around specific locations. These interactions can be multistep and are handled entirely through the conversation, allowing users a natural, intuitive way to quickly get recommendations for specific situations.

Heads Up sends occasional proactive nudges when a timely event is ending soon or something especially relevant has just been added to the catalog.

Texting as a delivery mechanism is deliberate. My Dude meets people in a tool already part of daily life, brings the information to them, and gets out of the way once there is a plan.

How it works

It all begins with the ingestion of events. My Dude combines public publishers, event feeds, calendars, opening trackers, and hands-on human curation in one live catalog. This human curation layer is a major differentiator, and one of our strongest defenses against competitors.

Some of the best neighborhood events, pop-ups, and one-off experiences never show in traditional search mechanisms, and not all of the sources humans can access are available to bots. Even when bots can retrieve information, they usually lack the judgment to pull out the specific experiences that people would find trendy or unique. In a world where platforms like OpenAI or Claude ship new features that can eclipse or include entire functionality from other AI startup companies, our human curation layer insulates us, it keeps us from ever being replaced or comparable to a solely AI competitor in this space.

After ingestion gemini turns fragmented inputs into structured records the system can understand and compare. When a member asks for something, code retrieves real candidates using time, distance, semantic similarity, stated taste, prior recommendations, and feedback. Gemini interprets the request, selects among that retrieved set, and writes a concise response.

What I built during the competition

I started My Dude on June 13, 2026. During the competition, I incorporated the business and built the foundation required to operate it day to day. That includes the public website and member portal, Stripe subscriptions, registered SMS delivery, the live local catalog, automated ingestion and human-curation workflows, scheduled Drops, on-demand chat, CSAT feedback, and internal tools for member support, catalog health, message delivery, and error monitoring.

At the center are the catalog and recommendation system. Building useful coverage required sustained local research, source evaluation, normalization, and repeated tuning. The system combines deterministic controls with AI so recommendations remain flexible, grounded, and traceable.

Gemini handles repetitive research, structuring, comparison, and response generation. Code enforces eligibility and grounding. Human judgment supplies local taste, finds high-quality sources automated systems miss, and decides what deserves trust. Specialist AI agents also support engineering, finance, compliance, operations, customer support, and marketing, while product decisions, spending, publishing, production releases, and customer promises remain founder-controlled.

My Dude opened a capped private beta on July 30 with live messaging and billing. Beta members surfaced real needs and helped tune the experience. After carrier approval, compliance work, provider integration, and delivery testing, production messaging moved to a registered Telnyx 10DLC number and a broader organic launch began.

As of August 17, My Dude had 35 registered production accounts. Stripe had processed nine successful $4.99 payments totaling $44.91 gross. Eight payments came from independent customers, one came from the founder, and family and friends used full-discount codes. Seven launch posts also generated 1,868 platform-reported views across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and X in their first two days.

Challenges and learning

The first major challenge was realizing that useful local discovery is not as simple as collecting event listings and asking a model to match keywords. Sources are incomplete, duplicated, stale, and uneven. Consistency required a real catalog, human curation, deterministic safeguards, and careful evaluation of how AI interprets and ranks options.

Messaging created a second challenge. My Dude initially used Sendblue for iMessage, but its economics and outbound limits did not fit scheduled Drops. Moving to Telnyx SMS improved the model but required 10DLC registration, several rounds of carrier review, clearer consent and opt-out controls, delivery testing, and tighter rules around alcohol-related language.

The broader learning was how differently a company operates when AI compresses research, implementation, review, and iteration. More decisions reached me, faster. I had to build systems with clear evidence standards, durable context, and approval boundaries so speed improved the company without weakening judgment.

What comes next

Phoenix is the proving ground. The first phase is to deepen local coverage, grow the user base, improve retention, and add click analytics plus lightweight “Did you go?” follow-ups. The current fully loaded plan reaches monthly break-even at roughly 130 paying members.

From there, My Dude can expand across Arizona and then into selected urban markets without rebuilding the core platform. Human curation will scale through paid local scouts and contributors, creating economic opportunities for people who know what is worth doing in their communities. As each market develops, subscriptions can be joined by venue partnerships and performance campaigns, while recommendation quality remains the reason members trust the service.

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