Move with your friends. Never lose track of them.

amiqo started in the back of an Uber in San Francisco. The driver was on speakerphone the whole ride, not with a person, with a chatbot. He had someone right there in the car and was talking to software instead.

That ride turned a vague feeling into an actual question: what does real connection look like when everything is designed to simulate it? The name came not long after. amigo in Spanish, amico in Italian. Friend.

It was a personal question before it was a product one. Kyle had assumed his closest friendships would hold on their own, and had started to notice that the ones he cared about most were exactly the ones he was neglecting.

The first version of amiqo was an events app. The pitch was simple: get off the couch, go do something real with people, in Atlanta.

None of it was built alone. Over that stretch amiqo had a real team, engineers, designers, marketers, a handful of interns, more than thirty people at its widest. Everyone was there because they believed adults deserve a better shot at keeping the people they care about, and they got v1 out the door on that belief.

It worked in exactly one way. We ran twenty-two partnered events across the city that year, from Beltline block parties to a recurring yoga class, and the rooms were good. People showed up, met each other, had the night we said they would.

What didn't work was everything that happened after the room emptied. A great event does not make an app people open on a Tuesday. We had built a reason to come out once and no reason to come back, and no amount of effort from that team could make the events angle stick or scale past the rooms we were physically standing in. That is not a failure of the people. It's the angle that was wrong, and it took a year of good work to prove it.

So the team wound down, with a lot of gratitude and no hard feelings. Kyle spent the back half of 2025 learning to build the whole thing himself, and in January relaunched amiqo solo.

The new bet was accountability. Plans between friends fall apart constantly, so we tried to put a cost on flaking and matched people with new friends nearby who wanted the same thing. The brand went hard and loud to match.

Two things came back clearly. Matching strangers only works where enough people are already using the app, which meant it worked in one city and nowhere else. And the accountability hook only mattered to people who had already made a plan, which most of them never did. We had built a fix for step four and lost people at step one.

So we split the product. One half kept trying to help people meet, the other half turned inward and helped you take care of the friends you already had. A daily practice: one small thing a day, remembered privately, on your side only.

The inward half needed nothing to work. No density, no matches, no other users in your city. It worked the day you installed it.

The outward half needed a crowd we did not have.

We stopped hedging and rebuilt from first principles around the half that actually worked.

Everything about meeting strangers came out. What stayed was the quiet part: a private log of the people who matter to you, which notices when someone you used to see all the time has gone quiet, and hands you an opener in your own words so reaching out takes one tap.

The brand changed with it. The loud dark version got retired for something warmer, closer to a scrapbook than a dashboard. amiqo went live publicly on both app stores in June.

The last thing we learned is that "keep your friendships alive" is true but abstract, and nobody schedules an abstraction. People do schedule a 6am class.

So the front door is now Join me. You post the class or the run you're headed to and your friends tap in to come with you. Rate the studio and the instructor so your people know where to go. Send a photo after, so the friend who couldn't make it still gets to see you.

Underneath all of it, the private log keeps doing its quiet job: remembering who you went with, and telling you when someone's drifted, before it's just a memory.

amiqo is a fitness and wellness app now, for the friends you already work out with. That is a smaller sentence than we started with, and it is the first one that has been fully true.