Vibecon at 30,000 Feet
I’ve wanted to visit the new YC office for ages. So when I heard about Vibecon, I figured I’d shoot my shot - even if it meant joining the hackathon remotely from 30,000 feet on a flight from London Heathrow to San Francisco. £19 for a whole flight of Wi-Fi. Worth it!
Vibecoding > movies, after all.
I got a reply the day before saying that I didn’t get a spot 😭, but I figured I would join anyway just to get a shot of motivation. The flight wasn’t wasted - I spent those hours making real progress on Kindred Spirits, the app I’ve been building to match people based on their “Thiel Secret” - the important truth very few people agree with you on.
You share your secret, swipe through others’ secrets, and get matched when you find someone who sees the world the same way you do. I think if we can better connect kindred spirits—founders, thinkers, artists, friends—we’ll have more families, companies, movements, and ideas that otherwise might never happen.
During the flight, I focused on three key improvements:
Improve the landing page design
The landing page needed work. I wanted it to feel clean, inviting, and focused on the core value proposition. Thanks to ChatGPT and Sora, the new design genuinely looks so much better. It retains its minimilist style, and clearly communicates the core idea: finding people who share your worldview.
Before:
After:
Include an option to specify your location
Since I built the first version of this at a London hackathon, the original community was based in London. I was about to release this to a bunch of people from San Francisco, so I needed a way for people to select their location and only see content from people in the same location.
Fix up the emails
This was a critical. The matching system was working, but users weren’t being notified properly when they found a kindred spirit. I made sure that you match with someone, you actually know about it.