Silicon Valley is obsessed with taste. Travel has always had a taste problem. Here’s why fixing it is a trillion dollar opportunity and why the infrastructure for it has never existed until now.
Arc Browser built a cult around it. Every AI founder is now describing their product as “opinionated.” Linear, Perplexity, Notion AI: the products winning are the ones that make a choice and commit to it.
The consensus is forming: the age of infinite content has a taste problem. Whoever solves taste at the infrastructure layer wins the next decade.
I’ve been thinking about this longer than most, because I built in AI for years, at Meta on Ray-Ban smart glasses, at Microsoft, scaling BrightAI as CPO, before starting Boop. And I kept watching the same failure mode play out in travel, over and over.
The friend who plans the best trips has no distribution. Her knowledge dies in a group chat.
You know who I’m talking about. She shows up at dinner with a reservation at the place no one else knew existed. She plans the bachelorette weekend that everyone talks about for three years. She just knows.
Her recommendations come from something rarer than SEO: she’s been there, and she knows you. She’s filtering for your budget, your vibe, your travel style, your group dynamic, in real time, from memory.
I am that friend. I’ve planned hundreds of trips, solo, girlfriend weekends, group chaos, international adventures and I started Boop because I watched that knowledge disappear over and over again.
Into group chats no one can search. Into a Notes app that exists on one person’s phone. Into a recommendation given once to one person, converted zero times, and then gone forever.
The travel internet has never figured out how to capture her. And that gap is now a trillion dollar problem.
Every travel platform of the last two decades was built on the same assumption: the way to help people travel better is more content.
More reviews. More listicles. More “Top 10 Things to Do in Barcelona.” More influencer content dressed up as authenticity. More AI-generated city guides that could have been written about literally anywhere.
The result? A travel internet so full of content that people now distrust all of it. You open TripAdvisor and see 47,000 reviews. You open Instagram and can’t tell if that hotel paid for the post. You ask ChatGPT for a recommendation and get a paragraph that sounds like a Wikipedia summary with the serial numbers filed off.
The taste layer is missing. Consumers feel it in their wallets, the wrong hotel, the forgettable restaurant, the trip that looked amazing on paper and landed flat in person.
This is what Boop figured out: the recommendations that actually convert, the ones people act on, book, remember, are the personal ones. The friend’s voice.
But the friend has never had infrastructure. She’s been operating on vibes, DMs, and shared Google Docs that get forwarded to twelve people and then die. Her taste has never scaled.
What if her trip became a living object? Something that could be discovered, copied, remixed, and booked, with her commission attached?
That’s the Travel Taste Economy: real taste, from real people who’ve actually been there, indexed at scale, paying the person whose judgment you trust.
We built the product around a word that made some people uncomfortable: Steal.
Steal My Trip. It’s intentional, because the mental model that unlocks this behavior is “take what worked.” Copy the thing someone else tested. Start from proof.
When someone steals a trip and remixes it, they’re acting on taste. The steal is a signal, this passed the trust filter. The remix is the personalization that makes it theirs. The creator earns a commission when that trip books, because her judgment converted.
Every Steal is a taste signal. Every Remix is an intent signal. Every booking is proof that taste converted to commerce. The index builds itself, because creators are paid to contribute to it and consumers are pulled toward it because it’s the only discovery surface grounded in what people actually did.
Boop is building the index of real human travel experience, the infrastructure layer through which travel decisions, discovery, and local commerce flow.
Layer 1 is the tool that makes capturing and sharing real trips effortless. Camera roll, location data, bookings, notes: turned into shareable, remixable trip objects automatically. Creators opt in because it saves them hours and earns them real money.
Layer 2 is the discovery engine, where you find real trips from people whose taste matches yours: friends, Besties, the Janna in your feed.
Layer 3 is where the categories collapse. When real experiences are indexed, queryable, and remixable at scale, the travel planning stack (search, reviews, content, booking) collapses into the index. Boop is that index.
We start at Layer 1, where the behavior is already happening, and build up from there.
The most valuable thing on the internet is the human judgment that’s been quietly unlocking great trips for years, unindexed, unpaid, and about to change.
Silicon Valley is right that taste matters. I’m betting on human taste: the real-world knowledge of where to go, what to do, who to trust, which currently lives in group chats and disappears.
That’s the last unmined index.
The friend who plans the best trips is about to get paid.
Nancy Li Smith
Founder & CEO of Boop AI (boopwithme.com). Previously built AI systems at Meta (Ray-Ban smart glasses), Microsoft, and scaled BrightAI to $100M+ revenue as CPO. Travel creator. The Janna in her friend group.
“Steal a real trip. Make it yours.” Try Boop →
Get trips like these in your inbox.
Free. Unsubscribe anytime. See our Privacy Notice.
