From podcasts to opportunities.

Last week, Cody represented SoGo on the Gildre for Founders podcast and went deep — his background building products, early sales instincts, the origin of SoGo, and what it actually takes to scale a startup from a group-chat idea into a real company with a product in users' hands.

We weren't pitching. We were just talking. And those conversations — candid ones, in rooms full of people who build things — are how the SoGo name starts reaching people who haven't found us yet. Founders talk to investors. Investors talk to operators. Operators eat out. You see where this goes.

Cody also shared the founder story — how SoGo grew out of a group chat into the company it is today — along with hard-won advice on building products and building a company. It's a reminder that distribution isn't just app downloads. It's showing up in conversations that matter before Beta 3 puts us in more hands. Every podcast, every pitch breakfast, every investor soiree — they're all part of the same flywheel.

The episode is out soon so stay tuned — then give it a listen if you want to hear what six-plus years of building this sounds like out loud.

Here's a habit I've picked up since we started building: every time I hit a dining friction point in real life, I write it down. Not to romanticize the problem — we have enough of that — but because the specifics matter. The vague stuff you already know. The specific stuff tells you what to actually build.

This week I had two of them. The first: I was trying to figure out a place before committing — not whether the food was good, but what the room felt like. Layout. Energy. Loud or quiet. Bar-heavy or table-forward. None of the tools I have give me that. Yelp has star ratings. Google has photos that may or may not be from 2018. I wanted The Concierge to tell me exactly what walking in would feel like — so I could decide before I showed up whether it matched the night I had in mind.

The second: after the meal, I wanted a place to log the kind of intel I'd actually pass along to someone. Not a star rating. Not a review. Something closer to a voice note for a friend — the thing you'd say over a drink when someone asks "is it worth it?" That signal, the word-of-mouth moment right after an experience, is exactly what SoGo's Social Dining Profile is built to capture — and it's exactly where every other app drops the ball.

These aren't feature requests I'm adding to a backlog. They're the product. The gap between "I went somewhere" and "now my friends know why they should or shouldn't" — that's the social dining layer we're closing.

We're targeting July 2026, which means we're in the final stretch — about a month out. The Path to 500 is becoming very real very fast. The builds are in motion, the team is locked in, and the features that are going to make this version feel different from every Beta that came before it are almost in your hands.

If you're already in Beta 2 — thank you. Keep using it. Keep sending us the moments where it fell short. That feedback is exactly what's shaping the version we're about to ship. If you're on the waitlist and haven't gotten access yet, now is the time to make sure your spot is locked in for July.

D7 retention at 25–30%. A "Very Disappointed" score above 40%. 500 active users. Those are the numbers that matter to us this summer — and the only way we hit them is if we ship something that people actually don't want to lose. That's the bar. We're building to it.

Until next week.

— Conner

_{*We are 'testing the waters' to gauge investor interest in an offering under Regulation Crowdfunding. No money or other consideration is being solicited. If sent, it will not be accepted. No offer to buy securities will be accepted. No part of the purchase price will be received until a Form C is filed and only through WeFunder’s platform. Any indication of interest involves no obligation or commitment of any kind.}

_{†Newsletter written by humans at Some Good People, Inc. Edited with AI because we're a small team that would rather build SoGo than proofread. Every idea is ours — we just had help with the polish.}