About PHARE

PHARE is a people discovery platform built on a simple premise: the people you're most compatible with aren't distinguished by their demographics or their dating app bios. They're distinguished by how they think, what frameworks they use to understand the world, the values that actually drive their decisions.

What it does

You have a conversation with an AI that extracts your worldview into a compressed profile. We call it a "phare" (like a lighthouse, cutting through the fog). Under 240 characters. Then that profile becomes a browsable poster card that other people can see.

If someone resonates with your phare, they can email you directly. No matching algorithms, no mutual interest gates. Just open contact, like the old internet. Like putting up a poster in your neighborhood and seeing who responds.

The design is intentional: we're filtering for people who actually do things, who are willing to reach out without guaranteed reciprocity. Because taking initiative is one of the clearest signals of compatibility.

Why this exists

I've moved a lot. Paris, Portland, Toronto. Every time you relocate, you're rebuilding your social network from scratch. And I kept noticing the same problem: the people I wanted to find weren't at the obvious places. They were scattered, doing interesting things in parallel, never quite intersecting.

Dating apps optimize for the wrong signals. Event platforms help you find activities but not necessarily your people. Social media is good for broadcasting but terrible for discovery based on depth.

What if we could make internal states legible and matchable? What if you could browse through how people actually think instead of what they look like or where they went to school?

The philosophy

This platform is deliberately insidery. It uses language as tribal signaling. If you read a phare and think "this person gets it," that's the point. If you're willing to write a thoughtful email to a stranger based on 240 characters, you're probably someone who builds things and takes initiative in the world.

We're not trying to be for everyone. We're trying to be for people who think in frameworks, who are looking for intellectual peers, who value worldview alignment over surface compatibility.

Loneliness is part of the metacrisis. This disconnection from self, from others, from the future. PHARE is my attempt at building infrastructure for serendipity. Not engineering connections directly, but creating optimal conditions for them to emerge.

What's next

Right now we're in early validation. Getting 50 friends to create profiles, tracking actual connection rates, seeing if phare compatibility translates to real-world relationships.

There's a launch party January 7th to test whether this works in physical space. Eventually we want to help event organizers find their actual target audience. Imagine advertising your workshop only to people whose phares suggest they'd genuinely care.

The long term vision is broader than dating. It's about helping compatible people discover each other across any context. Collaborators, friends, community members, anyone you'd want in your corner building a better world.

Because the thing is that the people who would make your life infinitely richer are probably already in your city. You just need a way to find each other.

Support this project

PHARE runs on Claude Sonnet for the conversations: about $50/month. This is a bootstrap project with no funding, just me building something I wish existed. If you want to help keep it running, you can contribute here:

Support on Ko-fi