Favorite

Yo bro, keep sending me stuff

My best friend Abdul and I have been sending each other things since we were kids. If you looked at our iMessages, they would be full of YouTube videos, songs, movies, articles. Check this out. Read this. Watch this interview. Because our interests were so close, every recommendation felt like a gift, and we kept telling each other the same thing: yo bro, please keep sending me interesting articles or stories or lectures. If you find anything good, send it to me. That thread is one half of Favorite. The other half is an idea I had been circling for years.

The information diet

Your thoughts are a direct reflection of the ideas and people you come in contact with. Everyone says to choose your friends carefully, but the same is true of your city, the content you consume, the artworks you spend time with. The effect of media on your mind is like the effect of food on your body. I know this because I lived it. In high school and community college, in a quiet suburb, there was no world around me that I wanted to be part of. My ambition, my specific knowledge, and a lot of my personality came from ideas I found on the internet. I listened to Rick Rubin, Alex Hormozi, Steve Jobs, Kanye West, people much older and more experienced than a kid in the suburbs had any business learning from. The more I listened to people who were ambitious, optimistic, creative, and curious, the more I became like that. I found I could program my mind on purpose. When I was depressed or unmotivated, I kept private notes that said: read this book again. Listen to this lecture again and again. So I was already keeping lists of the things that made me. Favorite is that practice, turned into a tool, with the people I trust inside it.

Superfans and ambitious kids

The tools that exist each get one half of this. Instagram lets people share what they love, but it also shows you everything else, much of it thrust upon you. Goodreads is limited to books and Letterboxd to movies, and the whole point is that everything that inspires you should live in one place: films, music, books, lectures, articles. Pinterest is a reference for visuals. Favorite is a reference for everything that shaped you. The people it's for are the superfans, the kids who are really into music, movies, videos, and podcasts and care about them, which is a lot of the internet. And the ambitious ones, who want to be intentional about what they consume, who want to learn and immerse themselves in great work rather than be entertained. We wanted Favorite to be a completely positive experience, a place you go specifically to enrich your mind.

One wall

I came up with the concept and the name, and Abdul and I talked it through for a long time. When Claude Fable came out, Abdul was curious what it could do and decided to test it by building Favorite. He engineered it; I helped shape the interface.

You save the things you love and they build a library. Search pulls covers and details for any film, show, album, book, podcast, or video, so a wall builds itself in minutes and looks like something worth staring at. If a library isn't beautiful, nobody keeps one. You can write a note on anything you save.

Then you follow your friends and see their walls. Taste grows through people, and Favorite is built on people you chose to follow and trust, not on an algorithm deciding what you should want. There is an element of choice at every step. A feed learns from what you save and why, and suggests new books, films, and music that fit your taste.

If I kept going

None of this exists yet. It's what I would do. The brand would come from The Little Prince: each person with their own small planet, and that hand-drawn picture book style, childish and creative and yet so mature and beautiful. Timeless. Films and drawings, the way Marble got posters. The marketing would be physical first. House parties where the music is submitted by the guests and mixed by the DJ. Movie nights, readings, book clubs. Online, a curated Instagram in the spirit of Cosmos or Open, and a series where artists and musicians people love share their top five. The whole thing built around intention: a tool that expands your taste and makes you more well read and more creative.

Status

Favorite is live at myfavoriteapp.com as an MVP, and it's parked there for now. Abdul moved on to other work, and I didn't want to grow it alone. It was an experiment more than a launch, and it has no numbers to show. What it has is the reason it exists, which I still believe: the things you love make you, and the best recommendations come from people, not feeds.

myfavoriteapp.com