detour — Community-First Pivot Plan

detour is a private, member-built network for places people pass to people they trust.

The decision

The product promise is: The places you pass to people you trust.

detour centers member recommendations, private place shares, and the context that makes a place worth passing on. Places remain the core unit. They are not presented as an authoritative guide, ranking, or compilation of external awards.

Retire from public product surfaces

• Guide, award, rank, Michelin, Repsol, star, Sol, and source-led framing.
• Source badges, award icons, official-source links, and guide-versus-community filters.
• Language that implies exhaustive coverage or expert-owned authority.

Preserve privately

• Existing places, maps, historical provenance, source records, and audit history.
• Existing invitations, member recommendations, and shares.
• The three-independent-member threshold before a member-added place becomes broadly discoverable.

City decision — locked

Members can recommend and share places anywhere in the world.

San Francisco is detour’s founding example, not a coverage boundary. City and locality remain useful place metadata and search context, but they do not constrain where a member may contribute or who may share a place. The app should never imply that a city picker defines detour’s territory.

Product model

1. A person joins through a personal invitation.
2. They choose a recognizable member identity and opt into discovery visibility only if they want it.
3. They recommend a place with a concise reason and relevant occasion.
4. They privately share that place with another member.
5. The recipient replies in a two-person thread attached to that specific share.
6. A place earns broader discovery only through repeated independent member recommendations.

A share is context, not a generic conversation starter. Replies remain private to the two participants and attached to the place that prompted them.

The experience to build

Member-first discovery

• The primary experience starts with recommendations and shares from a member’s private network.
• Member discovery visibility is opt-in and can be switched off at any time.
• City remains a search and place context, never the primary entry point.
• Invitations remain a deliberate quality mechanism.

Places as social objects

Every place should answer:

• Who recommended or shared it, when that member has chosen to be visible.
• Why it mattered to them.
• What it is good for.
• What a member can do next: share it, recommend it, or reply to the sender.

Contextual replies, not generic chat

• A member can reply from an existing private place share.
• Only the sender and recipient can read or write that thread.
• Threads retain the original place and share note as context.
• Replies are additive; existing shares remain intact.
• Do not introduce an open chat room, public feed, groups, or unsolicited conversation flow.

Delivery sequence

1. Truth, privacy, and preservation. Keep provenance and activity data while preventing it from driving public copy.
2. Silence guide-led framing. Remove guide, source, ranking, and award positioning everywhere users see it.
3. Make recommendations and private shares the daily member actions. Keep the three-member publication threshold.
4. Add opt-in network presence. Default every member to hidden.
5. Add secure replies to private shares. Keep conversations participant-only and place-scoped.
6. Evaluate behavior before building a feed. Track invitation acceptance, first recommendations, shares per active member, share-to-reply rate, repeat use, and opt-in visibility.

Defaults to preserve

• Keep historical guide and source data out of public framing rather than deleting it.
• Keep visibility opt-in by default.
• Keep invitations and handles as intentional trust mechanisms.
• Keep the three-member threshold for broader discovery.
• Keep member-added places worldwide, with San Francisco as the founding example.
• Start conversations through a private place share. Do not build generic chat or an open feed.

Success statement

A member should be able to say: “detour is where people I trust pass me the places they love — and where I can pass mine on.”

The authority comes from the quality and context of its members, not from a guide.