How SYNQ came about

A marketing guru once asked me about my Newton’s-apple moment. The one instant that made me build SYNQ. But somehow there was no such moment. SYNQ grew over years.

The first idea came years ago in Passau. Back then, somewhere in my mid-twenties, I fell for Wilhelm Busch and for poetry. It moved me how much life a few lines can hold. Beauty and grief, wisdom and humor, sometimes a whole new way of looking at things. And again and again I found something I badly wanted to share with someone. But with whom? Among my friends I was pretty much alone with this enthusiasm. So it stayed with me.

That’s when the first thought about SYNQ came to me:

“There must be someone who feels the same fascination and wants to share it just as much.”

Now I live in Munich, and sometimes I miss simply getting together. A beer after work, a round of basketball. As long as all my friends lived close by, that just happened. Then, one by one, the birds left the nest, for university or for work.

But it wasn’t only that. I started to wonder why, in a city full of people, you have so little to do with the people around you. You go to the same bakery, walk past the same bookshop, maybe live door to door for years, and still don’t necessarily feel part of a neighborhood.

Maybe being neighborly isn’t first of all a question of how many people you know. But of how you meet them.

And so the second thought about SYNQ came to me:

“There must be others who just want to play a round of basketball after work.”

I believe friendships often form along the way anyway. Not necessarily when you sit across from each other trying to get to know one another. But when you stand side by side and look at something together. At a chessboard, a basketball hoop, or simply into the evening sun. Shoulder to shoulder, so to speak.

It was friends who pointed out that SYNQ could also help existing groups of friends get organized. Whoever likes hosting game nights might use SYNQ for that too.

Either way, the thought of a social network for the neighborhood wouldn’t let go of me. I didn’t know one that did it the way I imagined.

I didn’t want to bring twenty people together in two weeks, but two in two hours.

After my master’s I built a first prototype in Passau. But it takes a lot to really bring a thought like that into the world. When I started working a few months later, it stayed a prototype for the time being.

Back in Munich it became clearer and clearer that I wasn’t the only one who’d like an app like that. I also began to believe it could do our society good.

Because I have the feeling something is starting to move. That a certain wish for change is in the air. We’ve learned to connect digitally, we can stay in touch with people all over the world, and yet sometimes we have surprisingly little to do with the people living just a few doors down.

Maybe it’s time to think about social networks differently, too. Facebook and the networks of its time brought a large part of our social lives into the digital world. Maybe now is the time for networks that lead us back out.

Networks that don’t pull social life onto the screen, but use the screen to enrich social life.

One contradiction keeps me busy: social networks are supposed to connect people. Yet their success is often measured by how long we stay on them.

Time on a screen isn’t badly spent time per se. Five minutes on the bus reading a lovely thought, getting an impulse that stays with you all afternoon — wonderful. But an hour scrolling through a feed and hardly knowing afterwards what you actually saw?

Maybe we should judge social networks less by how long we stay on them and more by what we take away from them.

And sometimes the best thing we take away is a reason to close the app. Because really, it can be that simple: meeting for a beer on the curb, talking about something, or playing half an hour of table tennis with a neighbor in the courtyard. Twenty minutes of sun on a bench. A spontaneous thought that turns into something shared.

Not every get-together has to be an event. Some things can simply be part of everyday life. Maybe that is exactly what makes everyday life a little more alive again.

The impulse system grew out of that thought. Small prompts that something can grow from. A lovely thought for yourself, or a nudge to do something together.

Of course, that raises questions. How do you make a social network interesting without wanting to keep people in it as long as possible?

And how do you actually make money with it? I’ve given that quite some thought. Because SYNQ shouldn’t stay just a nice idea; it should also be able to stand on its own feet.

One thing mattered to me from the start: the means should fit the end. Erich Kästner once found the right words for it:

That’s also why you won’t find SYNQ on the usual social media channels. I don’t want to use the very mechanisms SYNQ is meant to push back against a little.

But back to the story. On top of all these thoughts came something very practical: with Claude Code, building an app had gained a new lightness. After two or three years of work in Munich, I quit my job and started building SYNQ for real.

And now, well, here we are.

I hope that someone in a new city, or somewhere in their own neighborhood, spots the S on a door and thinks: “Ah, these are my people.”

That at the bakery you feel not only like a customer, but a little like a neighbor too. That courtyards fill up again with playing, talking and living. That someone sits down on the front steps with a coffee, and someone simply joins them.

Maybe friendships grow out of it. Maybe it stays a lovely afternoon. Either would be wonderful.

And maybe SYNQ can do a small part in changing life in our cities. In people turning towards each other again, doing more together, and letting something shared grow out of a spontaneous thought. Not because they have to. But because it’s simply possible.

That neighborhood is simply neighborly again.