Why I built fav.ing

When social media arrived I couldn’t get into it. It felt phony — everyone performing the best version of a life while the real one stayed offscreen. Twitter was the exception, and only because of one thing: I could follow people I actually respected and hear what they thought.

The rest of the internet answers “what’s good” with volume. Yelp and Rotten Tomatoes hand you the average of ten thousand strangers. Directionally useful, sure. But an average doesn’t know who you are, what you’re into, or what you’ve already loved. And the best-of lists that dominate search are mostly paid.

I can say that with confidence, because getting brands onto those lists has been my job. I’ve spent over ten years running e-commerce businesses on the brand side and more than fifteen building digital marketing and affiliate agencies, running campaigns for Fortune 1000 companies. Twenty-plus years of that has been affiliate marketing — which, a lot of the time, means helping a brand climb somebody’s “10 best” ranking. It’s a pay-to-play space. Those listicles are not what they look like.

So your two options are an average of strangers or a ranking somebody bought. Neither is the thing you actually want, which is one person whose taste you trust saying: trust me, order the meatballs.

I was watching Stephen Colbert get interviewed after winning a Grammy and he mentioned that one of his favorite bands is Neutral Milk Hotel. It’s one of my all-time favorites too.

That’s all it was. No algorithm, no five-star average, no sponsored placement. Someone I respect named a thing I love, and it landed — a small, ridiculous amount of glee. And then the part that stuck with me: I still want to know what else is on that list. If we have that one in common, what else does he have that I’ve never heard?

There’s nowhere on the internet to go find out. That’s the whole product.

fav.ing is a social app for lists of your favorite things — movies, books, restaurants, albums, recipes, gear, trails, tile guys. You make lists. You follow people whose taste you trust. And you can also post a current favorite in any category — the one show, the one album, the one restaurant you’re fully into right now.

Nothing gets deleted. When your current favorite changes, the old one moves into your history, so a profile isn’t a snapshot — it’s a record of what you were into and when. What somebody loved two years ago often tells you more about their taste than whatever they picked this week.

And when someone gives you a recommendation, you catch it. Hit create, type the name, done — two seconds and it’s in your bookmarks. Everything you save from anyone else’s list lands there too, sorted into To Watch, To Read, To Eat, To Listen, To Play. So when you’re on the couch at 9pm with no idea what to put on, the answer is a tab instead of a memory.

We have a phrase for it: AI slop. fav.ing is deliberately the opposite. No generated content, no engagement math, no feed built to keep you scrolling. Every list is a real person putting their taste on the record, which is exactly why it’s worth reading.

Creators can earn from product recommendations through affiliate commissions, and we tell you plainly when a link is commissionable. I’m not going to pretend that isn’t part of the business — I’ve been in that industry for two decades and I know exactly how it goes wrong. Anything sponsored will always be obviously sponsored. The day fav.ing reads like influencers shilling things they don’t use, the whole point is gone.

About a year, on nights and weekends. It started with a vibe-coding tool called Lovable — in just one weekend I had a working prototype and I sent it to a group of close friends, mostly to find out whether the idea was as good outside my head as it was inside it. It was. When Claude Code came out I rebuilt the whole thing properly on Next.js and Supabase, then added native iOS and Android with React Native. That was the point where twenty years of thinking about this turned into something that could actually scale.

fav.ing is live on iOS, Android, and the web at fav.ing.

I’ll know it worked when Stephen Colbert posts his favorite musical artists of all time.

Steve TazicFounder, fav.ing

Press and media inquiries: press@fav.ing. There’s a press kit with logos, screenshots, and boilerplate. For anything else, the contact page routes you to the right inbox.