Question 1

When does the waitlist actually open?

Accepted Answer

The waitlist opens on 14 May 2026 at 18:00 London, public signup, no password. Verified waitlist members get the app three days early on June 9, 2026. Public launch is June 12, 2026. Every position is locked by server timestamp, not whoever shouts loudest. If you join on 14 May 2026 at 18:00:00 London, that is your spot, for as long as your account is active.

Question 2

What do I get for joining now vs later?

Accepted Answer

Rewards are position-based and they compound. Every signup gets free subscription time at launch. Positions #1–100 get Icon (£14.99/mo) free for one month. Positions #101–500 get Icon free for two weeks. #501–2,000 get Explorer (£7.99/mo) free for one month. #2,001–10,000 get Explorer free for two weeks. #10,001 and below still get Explorer free for one week. Verified waitlist members also get 3-day early access on June 9. There is no way to buy a position, only referrals move you up.

Question 3

How do referrals work?

Accepted Answer

Each signup gets a unique /r/your-code link. Every verified friend who signs through your link moves you one spot up the queue and unlocks tier rewards: 1 referral = Bronze Tick, 5 = Silver Tick, 10 = Icon free for 1 month, 20 = Icon 3 months plus the Pioneer pin, 50 = Icon free for 6 months, 100 = Icon for a year plus the Gold Tick (top 100 only). Referrals must be real humans with working emails. Self-referrals and disposable domains get purged nightly.

Question 4

What is the Gold Tick and why does everyone keep banging on about it?

Accepted Answer

The Gold Tick is the single most valuable cosmetic in the app. Only ever awarded to the first 100 people who refer 100 verified signups each. Never reissued while active. Never sold. It shows up next to your handle everywhere in MYSOVA, leaderboards, Paths, venue check-ins, Night Recap, the lot. If you refer your 101st friend but you were the 101st person to reach 100, you do not get one. This is not a badge you can grind later. Once the hundred slots close, they close for good. That is the whole point of it being gold.

Question 5

Can I change my handle after reserving it?

Accepted Answer

Your first handle reservation is free and locked to your position, nobody else on the waitlist can take it. Once the app launches you can change it, but handle changes post-launch are a paid-tier thing (Explorer or Icon) to stop people squatting on ten usernames each. Exact policy is still being finalised and will be published before June 12. If you want a handle you genuinely care about, reserve it in the first 48 hours of the waitlist, after that, the common ones start going.

Question 6

What does MYSOVA actually do?

Accepted Answer

You open the app at a venue, check in, and earn XP. XP levels you through 11 ranks from Owlet to Ultimate SOVA. Strangers you shared a venue with on the same night appear in Paths, if you both tap CROSS, it becomes a Crossed Path and a conversation. At the end of the night the Owl assembles a Night Recap: your route, your zones, who you crossed, how much you climbed. Oracle is the AI layer, suggests where to go next based on the crowd, your DNA profile, your night so far. That is the loop.

Question 7

What exactly is Paths?

Accepted Answer

Paths is not a dating app. It is not your standard dating model, no swipe deck, no distance slider, no pool of strangers, no endless feed. It only ever surfaces phone-verified people who were checked in at the same venue as you on the same night. Same room, same night, real humans, that is the only qualifying filter, and it is what kills the bots. You see their card, rank, handle, a few shared moments, and you tap CROSS or PASS. If you both tap CROSS, it becomes a Crossed Path and you can message. If one of you passes, the other never finds out. The scarcity is the product.

Question 8

Is it London only?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Launch is London-only on purpose, 485 curated venues across 17 zones, from Soho to Shoreditch to Mayfair to Peckham. We wanted every zone to have real coverage before we added a single new city, because half-baked expansion is how nightlife apps die. Manchester, Bristol, Berlin, Amsterdam and Lisbon are all on the 2027 list, in that rough order. If you are not in London, you can still join the waitlist, your position holds, and when your city opens you get early access the same way the London waitlist did.

Question 9

iOS and Android both?

Accepted Answer

Both, from day one. Built in React Native on Expo so the two platforms ship from a single codebase, no Android-as-afterthought lag. App Store and Google Play review is already cleared for submission, D-U-N-S verified, Google Play developer account live, Apple developer verification in progress. No web version, no Instagram DM fallback, no SMS hack. The app is the product. If you cannot download the app, you are not in the game, that is a deliberate design choice, not a bug.

Question 10

How do XP and ranks work?

Accepted Answer

You earn XP on every verified check-in. Base XP is weighted by zone, Soho, Mayfair and Shoreditch check-ins are worth 1.5× because those zones are denser with MYSOVA venues. Streaks, first-in-zone, late-night windows and Crossed Paths all stack multipliers. There are 11 rank tiers, Owlet, Local, Regular, Scene Maker, Night Owl, Pathfinder, Tastemaker, Phantom, Legend, SOVA and Ultimate SOVA, each with Roman-numeral sub-levels. The curve is intentionally steep at the top. Ultimate SOVA takes the kind of commitment normal humans do not have.

Question 11

Who can see my check-ins?

Accepted Answer

By default: your friends, and people who shared a venue with you that night (through Paths). Everyone else sees only your public profile, rank, handle, badges. No check-in history, no venue list, no patterns. Phantom Mode flips one switch and makes you invisible to Paths entirely, you can still check in, earn XP, see your own Night Recap, but strangers never see you cross. You can toggle it per-night. You can flush your history at any time from Settings. You own the receipts.

Question 12

Is this a dating app?

Accepted Answer

No. MYSOVA is not a dating app. There is no geographic radius setting, no search, no pool of profiles to swipe through, no browsing strangers. The only way another human ever appears in your Paths feed is if the two of you physically shared a venue on the same night and you are both phone-verified. That is a hard constraint at the database level, not a setting, same room, same night, real humans only. It occasionally produces Crossed Paths, because humans cross paths. That is a side effect, not the premise.

Question 13

Age requirements and verification?

Accepted Answer

Hard 18+ only. Every signup goes through an age gate before account creation, and suspicious accounts go through additional verification. We do not host under-18s, full stop, not even with parental consent. Some venues on the roster are 21+ and that is enforced at the door by the venue, not by the app. The app will flag 21+ venues in the feed so you do not waste a tube fare. Fake age = account terminated + IP banned. It is not a clever line to cross.

Question 14

GDPR and data deletion?

Accepted Answer

Built around UK GDPR. MYSOVA LTD is registered with the ICO. You can export everything we hold on you, check-ins, Paths, messages, XP history, as a JSON bundle, any time, from Settings > Privacy. You can delete your account from the same screen, and we treat that as a UK GDPR Article 17 request. Deletion triggers a 30-day soft retention for legal and fraud reasons (chargebacks, safety reports) and after that every row with your identifier is either deleted or irreversibly hashed. No shadow profiles. If you want it gone, it goes.

Question 15

What data do you actually collect?

Accepted Answer

Only what the product needs to work. Email, handle, age-gate answer, device push token. When you check in, we record the venue ID and a timestamp, we do not store your precise GPS coordinates, only a rounded bucket tied to the venue polygon. There is no persistent background location tracking. No ad SDK. No third-party analytics that can see user-level events, we use Vercel Analytics for aggregate traffic and platform-level error logs (stripped of PII), and that is it. We do not sell anything. We do not share with advertisers. There is nobody to share with, we do not have advertisers.

Question 16

Who actually built this?

Accepted Answer

Solo founder. PV, Estonian, based in London, sole director of MYSOVA LTD. Ten-week build from first commit to waitlist launch. React Native on Expo, Next.js on Vercel, Supabase on the backend. No team, no agency, no ghostwriters. The code, the brand, the venue outreach, the trademark filings, the HMRC paperwork, all one person. If you email hello@mysova.co.uk the reply is from PV. That is partly the appeal and partly a constraint we will be hiring out of later this year.

Question 17

How is MYSOVA funded?

Accepted Answer

Founder-funded. No VC, no angel round, no pre-seed, no accelerator. MYSOVA LTD (Companies House #17154283, registered 2026-04-13) owns everything, the codebase, the trademarks (word mark UK00004373417, owl mark UK00004373474), the domains, the brand. That setup is deliberate. Zero dilution at launch means the product can stay honest, no ads, no growth hacks forced in by investors, no pivot-to-enterprise panic after 18 months. If it needs capital later it will raise it on its own terms.

Question 18

How do you make money?

Accepted Answer

Subscriptions. Three tiers: Free (check in, basic rewards, ranks up to Night Owl), Explorer £7.99/mo (full gamification, Paths, Oracle, all ranks), Icon £14.99/mo (everything in Explorer plus priority venue access, Night Recap Pro, custom badge colours, and the Icon-only leaderboard). There is no ad inventory. There is no data sale. Your £7.99 is the entire business model. We would rather a smaller app full of people who chose to be there than a larger one full of people we dragged in with ad impressions.

Question 19

Are venues paying you to be featured?

Accepted Answer

Partially. All 485 launch venues are listed free, they were chosen on merit, not wallet. PV is approaching every one personally to bring them on board. Soon the platform will be irresistible to venue owners, and that is when the real power kicks in: venues become the ones giving real love back to people directly, boosts, drinks on the house, priority queues, hidden moments, perks routed through the app to the people who actually showed up. The dashboard side (photos, events, featured moments, zone sponsorships) is a paid product for venues, separate from whether a venue appears in your feed or gets good Oracle scores. No pay-to-rank, no paid check-ins, no buying your way up the Night Owl rankings. The ranking logic is public. If a venue ever pays to bend the feed, it will be labelled "sponsored" in full caps, no exceptions.

Question 20

How do I get in touch?

Accepted Answer

Email hello@mysova.co.uk. It is a real inbox monitored by a real person, usually a reply within 4 hours during London working hours, always within 24. For press there is a full kit at /press (fact sheet, quotes, logo pack). For a bug at launch, use the in-app Help screen so we get device context. For anything else, venue partnerships, investor conversations, a question you cannot find the answer to here, just email. The tone is casual. No PR templates required.

FAQ

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What MYSOVA does

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