Telescope is a member-funded network for recommendations people actually trust. Members subscribe, follow curators, and their feed is exactly what those curators publish. I started building it in late 2024.
Most curators start with a city guide, and a lot of that work is already sitting in Google Maps. Telescope takes a shared list URL and hands back a reviewable collection with places, addresses, categories, and photos. Shared lists identify places by a different kind of ID than the Places API accepts, and there's no documented way to convert between them. So the parser builds the ID the API expects from the list data. Lists are messy, full of dropped pins, dead entries, and places the API won't enrich. Anything the parser can't resolve comes back flagged Needs Review, and the curator fills in the details or drops the entry. Nothing saves until they've cleared it, and what saves is one transaction: the whole collection or none of it.
Members originally subscribed to curators individually, and we found nobody wanted a stack of monthly subscriptions for short-form recommendations. The version after that put a paywall on publishing. A curator hit it and told us she hadn't realized it was there, and wouldn't have used the product if she had. Members now pay one platform subscription, curators publish freely, and engagement with members-only collections feeds a pool that pays out through Stripe Connect. I had modeled entitlements as a paid relationship between two people, and now they had to be a property of the account. I rebuilt the subscription tables around one subscription per user. Collections traded a public/private boolean for three-state visibility, threaded through queries, feeds, search, and entry detail. Every existing row landed in that shape with no window where someone already paying lost access.
Telescope is live, still small, and I'm the only engineer on it.