One of the most common questions I get is:
“When are you adding my city?”
Edmonton. Canberra. Nashville. Bangalore. Pune. Jakarta.
The honest answer is that adding a city isn’t simply a matter of collecting places on a map.
Datespots isn’t trying to become a directory of every café, restaurant, or museum in the world. The goal is to help two people spend time together, which means the city itself has to support that experience.
Over time, I’ve realized that not every city does.
A City Needs More Than Population
Population is the first thing people point to.
“If millions of people live there, surely it deserves to be on Datespots.”
Not necessarily.
A city with ten million residents doesn’t automatically produce ten million people looking for date ideas.
What matters is whether there’s an active culture of going out, exploring neighborhoods, spending time in public spaces, trying new cafés, visiting galleries, attending events, and treating the city itself as part of the experience.
Some smaller cities have remarkably vibrant social scenes.
Some much larger cities don’t.
Population alone tells very little.
There Has to Be Enough to Discover
Every city eventually reaches a point where the recommendations become repetitive.
You can only list so many cafés before they all start looking the same.
For Datespots, I want each city to feel like it has personality.
Can someone spend months exploring without seeing the same recommendations over and over?
Are there neighborhoods with different identities?
Does the city have unique experiences that aren’t interchangeable with every other city?
If the answer is no, adding hundreds of mediocre places only makes the product worse.
I’d rather support fewer cities well than dozens poorly.
Data Quality Matters More Than People Realize
This is probably the least visible part of the project.
Some cities have excellent public data.
Neighborhoods are clearly defined.
Addresses are consistent.
Maps are accurate.
Local publications regularly highlight interesting places.
Other cities are the complete opposite.
Neighborhood names overlap.
Businesses appear under multiple names.
Maps disagree with reality.
Places open and close with little notice.
Even modern AI struggles because it ultimately depends on the same underlying information.
If the source data is unreliable, the recommendations become unreliable too.
Demand Has to Justify the Work
Building a city usually takes an entire day of focused work.
Maintaining it never stops.
Every closed café, renamed museum, or new restaurant has to be reviewed.
That effort has to be balanced against how many people are actually using the city.
A city that receives only a handful of visitors each month isn’t just expensive to build. It’s expensive to keep accurate.
As an independent project, those tradeoffs matter.
Safety Isn’t Optional
This is probably the most difficult criterion to talk about.
Datespots encourages people to meet in public.
That means I have to think beyond interesting places.
Would I be comfortable recommending someone spend an evening walking between neighborhoods?
Is public transportation reasonably dependable?
Are visitors likely to feel comfortable exploring unfamiliar areas?
Those questions don’t have universal answers, and every city contains both safer and less safe neighborhoods.
But they do influence whether I feel confident publishing recommendations.
If someone follows a suggestion from Datespots, there’s an implicit level of trust involved.
I take that responsibility seriously.
Culture Matters Too
Cities are shaped by more than infrastructure.
They reflect how people socialize.
In some places, dating is built around cafés, parks, bookstores, waterfronts, museums, and public events.
In others, social life is centered around family, private gatherings, shopping malls, or activities that don’t translate well into a location-based discovery platform.
Neither approach is better.
They’re simply different.
Datespots works best in places where exploring the city is already part of everyday life.
It’s About Quality, Not Coverage
I could probably add another hundred cities this year.
The internet already contains enough lists to do that.
But that isn’t the product I’m trying to build.
I’d rather have 25 cities that people genuinely enjoy using than 250 cities filled with generic recommendations that nobody trusts.
Sometimes saying “not yet” is the best product decision.
Sometimes the answer is “probably never.”
Not because those cities aren’t important.
Because Datespots can only succeed if every city meets the same standard.