FindTribe

I built it because I kept getting lost

The first time was at Disney when I was a kid. Years later, it happened again at a music festival.

Apparently, getting lost is a recurring theme in my life.

At a festival, the problem gets worse in a very specific way. Tens of thousands of people arrive at once. The cell network slows down or disappears. A friend walks away for water, a bathroom, or a better view of the stage, and suddenly a simple question—“Where are you?”—has no useful answer.

“By the main stage” could mean anywhere among ten thousand people. A dropped pin may point to an empty field on a generic map. Messages sit unsent. The music is still playing, but the night has changed. Instead of being present, you are scanning faces and wondering whether the person you came with is safe.

That feeling is where FindTribe began.

I wanted a map made for the place in front of me, not the place that existed before the gates went up. I wanted to see the stage, the medical tent, the nearest bathroom, the meeting point, and the car waiting somewhere in a dark temporary lot.

Most of all, I wanted to find my people.

A map for the places that disappear

Traditional maps are excellent at describing the permanent world: streets, buildings, restaurants, airports, and addresses that will probably still be there tomorrow.

A festival is different. For three days, an empty field becomes a small city with roads, stages, gates, vendors, medical stations, campsites, and tens of thousands of temporary residents. Then the entire city disappears.

FindTribe gives places like that a living map.

People can create and share a map around what matters right now. The map can change when an entrance moves, a road closes, a medical point opens, or a new place becomes important. Friends can appear on it only when they choose to share. A saved car, campsite, or meeting point remains useful long after every landmark starts looking the same.

The aim is not to keep someone staring at a screen. It is to give them one clear glance, one useful direction, and the confidence to look up again.

Exhibit 01 · Find your people

A crowd can feel endless when one person matters. Move your marker and watch your tribe find a way back to you.

Then it stopped being only about festivals

I have family in Colombia.

When an earthquake struck, communications went down, and for hours I could not reach people I love.

I could not ask whether they were safe. I could not know whether they were hurt. I could not even know whether my messages had reached their phones.

There was nothing to do but wait.

While I was waiting, FindTribe changed for me.

I realized that temporary places are not always created for celebration. Sometimes the world becomes temporary because something has gone wrong.

An earthquake can change a neighborhood overnight. A familiar road can become impassable. A school can become a shelter. A parking lot can become a medical station. A place nobody needed yesterday can become the place everyone needs today.

The physical world can change faster than an ordinary digital map can reflect it. And sometimes, while the map is changing, the network disappears with it.

The festival problem and the emergency problem are not the same. But they share a human need: understand where you are, know what is around you, find the people who matter, and reach them when the usual systems fail.

That is the larger problem I am now building FindTribe to solve.

Maps that change with the world

FindTribe lets people create maps for changing environments, not only established streets and permanent places.

At a festival, a shared map might hold stages, gates, bathrooms, medical tents, vendors, meeting points, and the place where you parked.

When a community is disrupted, the same map can hold shelters, blocked roads, supply points, safe gathering places, and newly opened sources of help.

The details are different. The principle is the same: map what matters now, share it with the people who need it, and update it as the situation changes.

This matters because a useful map is more than a picture. It is a shared understanding of the world. When the world changes, that understanding needs to change with it.

You press send. FindTribe finds the path.

Most apps are built around an assumption we rarely notice: the internet will be there.

Usually, it is. Until a crowd overwhelms the cell towers, a storm takes down power, or an earthquake damages the systems behind the signal bars on a phone.

FindTribe is being built to use more than one path.

When the internet works, it can use the internet.

When it does not, nearby phones can pass small, protected messages directly from one device to another using Bluetooth. One phone helps the next, and the connection can move through the people around you instead of depending entirely on a distant tower.

For greater distances, I am extending FindTribe with LoRa: small, long-range radios that can carry a message much farther than Bluetooth. Dedicated devices placed across an area can help bridge spaces where people and phones are spread out.

The names of those technologies matter to me as the builder. They should not matter to the person trying to reach a friend, a child, or a parent.

That person should not have to choose a network. They should not have to understand how the message travels.

They should be able to press send.

FindTribe should look at the paths available and use the one that can get the message closer.

Honest about the limits

Resilient does not mean magical.

Bluetooth cannot cross a city or an ocean by itself. It needs other nearby devices to help carry information. LoRa can reach much farther, but it needs dedicated radios placed where they can help. If no path exists, a message must wait until one does.

FindTribe’s emergency features are also designed to reach the people a user trusts; they are not a replacement for emergency services. If someone can contact local emergency responders, they should.

Those limits belong in the story because trust is more important than spectacle. I do not want to promise that a connection can never fail. I want to remove as many single points of failure as I can—and make the system clear about what is happening when someone needs it most.

Useful before the difficult moment

A resilient network cannot wait for an emergency to become familiar.

That is one reason festivals still matter so much to the product. They are joyful, demanding places where people can learn FindTribe naturally: create a tribe, share a location, drop a meeting point, save the car, download the event map, and find the way back to each other.

The same habits become far more valuable when a situation is stressful.

FindTribe is designed so that the everyday experience and the difficult experience strengthen each other. The app someone downloads for a festival can already be on the phones of the people they love when the network goes quiet.

Intelligence in its proper place

AI remains useful, but it is no longer the center of the story.

When a connection is available, the FindTribe assistant can answer questions about an event: when an artist plays, where a vendor is, which entrance to use, or how to reach a marker on the map. AI can also help an organizer turn event information into a useful map more quickly.

That convenience should sit on top of a dependable foundation, not replace one.

The map, the people, the meeting point, and the ability to carry a message are the parts that matter when the connection disappears. The clever layer is helpful. The reliable layer is essential.

Private because location is personal

Knowing where someone is can be comforting. It can also be deeply sensitive.

FindTribe is built around explicit choice. People decide who can see them and when. They can stop sharing at any time. A nearby stranger’s phone may help carry a protected update across a crowd, but that stranger should not be able to read it or learn who is speaking.

Privacy is not a setting added after the map works. It is part of whether the map deserves to exist at all.

The goal is not to make everyone visible. It is to make the right people reachable.

What building FindTribe has taught me

FindTribe began with an embarrassing personal pattern: I kept getting lost.

The first versions were about festivals because that was where I felt the problem most clearly. Build a better map. Find the stage. Find the bathroom. Find the car. Find the friends who vanished into the crowd.

I still care about every one of those moments.

But the experience in Colombia showed me the deeper thread running through the product. Sometimes people are lost because a crowd separated them. Sometimes they are lost because the world around them suddenly changed. Sometimes someone feels impossibly far away only because the infrastructure between two phones stopped working.

The hardest design problem is not Bluetooth, LoRa, mapping, or AI on its own. It is bringing those pieces together without making a frightened or overwhelmed person think about any of them.

Good technology explains itself.

The best technology lets someone focus on the person they are trying to reach.

Read the full story behind this change →

Find your way. Find each other.

I am building FindTribe for temporary worlds: the ones created by music, movement, celebration, weather, disaster, and everything else that can change a place faster than an ordinary map can keep up.

It is a platform for understanding what is around you, finding the people who matter, and staying connected without placing all of that trust in a single network.

I still want to make sure nobody gets lost at a festival.

I just understand now that there are much bigger ways to get lost.

Losing the internet should not mean losing the ability to find your way, understand what is happening around you, or reach the people you love.

That is what I am building FindTribe to solve.