Why I built Spotlist

I joined the Google Maps team in 2018 because I wanted to make restaurant discovery better. It was a problem I cared about personally.

What I found surprised me. The people building Maps weren't using it to keep track of their favorite restaurants. They were using spreadsheets and Google Docs. When I asked why, the answer was pretty simple: Google Maps is built for a different job. Finding something nearby, getting directions, figuring out if it's open. It's excellent at that. Curating and sharing personal lists just wasn't a problem it needed to solve.

That observation stuck with me for a long time.

Because there are a lot of people who care deeply about where they eat. People who have been keeping lists for years — in Notes, in spreadsheets, in a Google Doc shared with three friends, in a group chat that's impossible to search. People whose friends text them before every trip. People who plan around meals. People who remember a meal from four years ago in a city they visited once and can tell you exactly what to order.

Those people have never had a good place to put that knowledge. And the tools that were supposed to help — the review apps, the rating platforms — weren't really built for them either. They were built for scale. And scale means serving everyone, which means averaging everyone's opinion into a number that's supposed to tell you something but mostly doesn't.

When 68% of ratings are four stars or above, the signal disappears. You're left scrolling through reviews from strangers whose taste you don't know, trying to reverse-engineer whether a place is actually good or just inoffensive. It's exhausting. And it doesn't work.

The better answer has always been simpler. You text that one friend who knows.
Spotlist is built around that idea. You curate lists of places you genuinely love — the way you'd make a playlist, or a running document you'd share with someone you trust. Other people find those lists, follow the ones that match their taste, and actually use them. When you're traveling somewhere new, you find the person who knows that city the way you know yours.

No ratings. No reviews. No ads. Just recommendations from people who ate there with their own money and thought it was worth remembering.

When you recommend a restaurant to someone, you almost never find out what happened. They went or they didn't. It was right for them or it wasn't. Spotlist closes that loop. When someone visits a place from your list and it lands, they can say so. A simple thank you. No leaderboards, no points — just the thing you actually wanted to know: the recommendation was useful.

We measure success one way: was it a useful recommendation? That's the whole point.

If you've been keeping a restaurant list somewhere and wishing it were easier to share, this is where it belongs. Import it in thirty seconds — paste it in, or screenshot wherever you keep it. It's yours. We just made it easier to find and easier to share.